Books

First printing of the true first edition with the no. 1 on the printer's page, as called for. ***Winner of the 2009 Booker Prize. *** fine in black cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to the spine. Boards clean and unmarked. Corners sharp. There is no reading crease to the centre of the spine - being a large quite poorly bound book, copies are often found with spine creases and sagging paper stock. This copy is perfect, with a tightly bound paper block and no reading lean to the binding. Spine tight. Internally also fine with no inscriptions. Pages clean Color-illustrated front and rear free endpapers and pastedowns taken from De Ludo Scachorum by Luca Pacioli. ***In a fine color illustrated dust jacket, that has not been price-clipped, showing the original publisher's printed price of �18.99. No creases or tears. No fading even to the spine color. Dust jacket author's note plus one-page acknowledgments to rear. 240mm x 158mm. *** 'England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the petulant king's freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock. ***Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer, Cromwell has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power, and is prepared to break some more. Rising from the ashes of personal disaster - the loss of his young family and of Wolsey, his beloved patron - he picks his way deftly through a court where 'man is wolf to man.' Pitting himself against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy, he is prepared to reshape England to his own and Henry's desires. ***From one of our finest living writers Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.' (Quote from inside front of dust jacket blurb) ***First printing of the true first edition, in its original dust jacket in very nice bright collectable condition. Winner of the Booker Prize for 2009, and the first part of Hilary Mantel's trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell, concluded in 2020 with The Mirror and the Light. This is the best copy i have come across - truly a collector's copy of this fine novel.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize, 'Wolf Hall' explores the complex personality of Thomas Cromwell and his rise to power in the court of Henry VIII.