Books

MANTEL, Hilary The Wolf Hall Trilogy [Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies [and] The Mirror and the Light] Signed Limited Editions London: Fourth Estate, 2009-2020 8vo., 3 vols; specially-bound in publisher s black and red cloth, decorative devices in gilt to upper covers of each board; with repeat devices to spine, along with gilt lettering, borders, and publisher s device to foot; black and red ribbon markers; decorative headbands; plain black/red endpapers; pp. [vi], vii-xvii, [iii], 3-653, [i]; [viii], ix-xiii, [vii], 3-411, [iii]; [x], ix-xiv, [vi], 3-883, [xi]; complete with diagrams of family trees; fine copies all, vol I still sealed in the original shrink wrap with price sticker. First, limited editions, each boldly signed by the author. Mantel s pinnacle work charting the rise, progress and fall of Thomas Cromwell from humble beginnings as the son of a blacksmith, through the court of Henry VIII, and his encounters with Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Jane Seymour, and a host of many other political and royal figures in Tudor England. Impeccably researched, Mantel devoted over 16 years of her life to the writing of this much-loved saga, which combines true historical events with fictional dialogue and stories to successfully peel back history, and expose a society on the brink of great change. Mantel had already written a work of historical fiction - A Place of Greater Safety (1992), which focused on the French Revolution - when she had the idea to focus on another pivotal point in English History. 2009 marked the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII s accession, and with this in mind, she pitched a new idea to her publisher: one which focused on the great minister, a character with whom she had been fascinated for some 30 years. Previously discussed in biographical or non-fiction books, He seemed not to have a private life , she later wrote, It wasn t that I wanted to rehabilitate him. I do not run a Priory clinic for the dead. Rather, I was driven by powerful curiosity. If a villain, an interesting villain, yes? And so the idea for Wolf Hall was born - the title taken directly from the name of the Seymour family seat at Wolfhall or Wulfhall in Wiltshire. The title further refers to an old Latin saying Homo homini lupus ("Man is wolf to man"), which serves as a constant reminder of the dangerously opportunistic nature of the world through which Cromwell navigates. By the time she set down her pen, the trilogy numbered some 2000 pages. [It] crackled like gunfire , her editor writes in a Booker Prize article, which discusses his thoughts after the first line of the book, a taunt that would hang over everything Hilary poured herself into over the next decade, a sentence she would return to hundreds of pages later as she would finally take Cromwell to the scaffold in The Mirror & the Light. It was a switch into a fresh way of treating historical fiction, showing us characters living in the moment, attended to in the present tense, unaware of what the future holds for them. As a reader, one felt embedded somewhere in the back of Cromwell s skull, alert to the brutal world of Tudor England, events unspooling before him while we looked on. Both Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies won the Booker Prize in the year of publication, making Mantel the first woman to win the prestigious award twice, and the trilogy is often considered to be a modern classic. In 2015, the first two books were adapted into a six-part BBC series starring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn. The final part in the series, based on The Mirror and the Light, completed filming this year (2024), and is due to be released early in 2025. A wonderful set, and the only one to be published uniformly in this format.

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.