Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall

Book Bag“It's beautiful and rich and deep and absolutely relevant...” Dense in both form and detail, it's a demanding read but an absolutely immediate and all-consuming one. I put it down after the final page with a real sense of regret. I don't think I've ever read a better piece of historical fiction...

Scotsman“Mantel's approach is oblique and ingenious...” Wolf Hall must be a frontrunner for this year's Man Booker Prize. Mantel's Cromwell is an almost Shakespearean creation: self-aware and self-doubting, ruthless and sentimental, an iconoclast attuned to the power of images and the image of power...

The New Yorker“The prose is elastic. Sometimes it’s elliptical...” Mantel’s characters do not speak sixteenth-century English. She has created for them an idiom that combines a certain archaism with vigorous modern English. It works perfectly. And how urbane her people are!...

The New York Times“Her book’s main characters are scorchingly well rendered...” Deft and diabolical as they are, Ms. Mantel’s slyly malicious turns of phrase would count for little more than banter if they could not succinctly capture the important struggles that have set her characters to talking...

The Independent“A seductive historical novel...” Mantel's writing is taut; the dialogue sprints along, witty and convincing. She draws her extensive cast with deft strokes...

Publishers Weekly“Mantel captures the atmosphere of the times...” Unfortunately, Mantel also includes a distracting abundance of dizzying detail and Henry's all too voluminous political defeats and triumphs...

Financial Times“Not yet reviewed”

The Times“As I opened the book I was gripped...” This is a wonderful and intelligently imagined retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle — one that makes the drama unfolding nearly five centuries ago look new again, and shocking again, too...

Guardian“A beautiful and profoundly humane book...” Mantel has always been obsessed by the capriciousness of fortune and in a novel full of bounds and tumbles, she provides a masterclass in the tragic arc of ascent and decline...

The Telegraph“Mantel rewrites the history of England...” Every now and then an artist of another mettle is drawn into the Tudor fray, and turns everything we knew on its head. Mantel knows how to build a picture from the parts available, with nothing extraneous and everything layered...