The Mirror & the Light

“The Wolf Hall trilogy is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade."—The New York Times Book Review

“The Mirror & the Light is the triumphant capstone to Mantel’s trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rose to become the consigliere of Henry VIII . . . The world is blotted out as you are enveloped in the sweep of a story rich with conquest, conspiracy and mazy human psychology . . . Mantel is often grouped with writers of historical fiction, [but] the more apt, and useful, comparison might be with Robert Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, the great anatomizer of political power."—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“Wolf Hall, a decade ago, was a sensational character study that electrified an often-visited slice of history. The Mirror & the Light marks a triumphant end to a spellbinding story."—NPR

“Cromwell [has] a depth at once Shakespearean and modernist. He could be Hamlet, or the title character of one of Freud’s case studies . . . The dissolution of Cromwell coincides with his unmooring in time . . . One moment he is sucked into his childhood; the next, he is hurled into the sphere of the angels. Indeed, the afterlife occasions some of the loveliest writing in this beautifully written book . . . By the end of these three books, we have been with Cromwell as he lived or revisited most of his life, and we haven’t exhausted his mystery."—Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic

“Brilliant . . . From that opening sentence—‘Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away’—axes and the shadow of death are everywhere . . . Mantel takes what is known of Cromwell—his meteoric rise, his autodidactic scholarship, his reformist tendencies—and weaves them into a masterful portrait of a man at mid-life, facing up to his past."—The Boston Globe

“Majestic and often breathtakingly poetic . . . What The Mirror & the Light offers—even more than the two previous volumes—is engulfing, total sensory immersion in a world . . . As with the most powerful and enduring historical fictions, the book grips the reader most tightly when, as is often the case, the writing comes as close to poetry as prose ever may."—Simon Schama, The Financial Times

“Breathtaking . . . The plot here is shaped as meticulously as any thriller . . . With this trilogy, Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of . . . Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century. Someone give the Booker Prize judges the rest of the year off."—Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian

“A masterpiece . . . A novel of epic proportions [that is] every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors . . . The trilogy is complete and it is magnificent."—Alexandra Harris, The Guardian

“A stunning capstone to an epic that’s both engrossing history and an unsurpassed literary achievement . . . The Mirror & the Light is a diadem of riches, binding together the complex pieces of Cromwell’s character while leading inexorably toward the scaffold. With the trilogy now complete, Mantel cements her position as one of our greatest literary stylists and innovators."—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“Cromwell is a character for the ages . . . The stunning success of the novels is in large part the result of Ms. Mantel’s skill in fashioning a voice and persona that, while never anachronistic, make Cromwell seem eerily contemporary . . . Mantel’s genius is to make his 16th-century instincts, such as a willingness to decapitate anyone standing in his path, seem as plausible as his more familiar qualities."—The Economist

“Fascinating . . . What Mantel does, often brilliantly, is put movement and muscle on the bare bones of what’s known . . . [Cromwell’s] bundled contradictions—a polyglot scholar with bruised knuckles, as ruthless in business as he was benevolent at home—are more than mirror and light; they’re real, indelible life."—Entertainment Weekly

“This is rich, full-bodied fiction. Indeed, it might well be the best of the trilogy simply because there is more of it, a treasure on every page . . . The brisk, present-tense narration makes you feel as though you are watching these long-settled events live, via a shaky camera phone . . . Mantel has . . . elevated historical fiction as an art form . . . At a time when the general movement of literature has been towards the margins, she has taken us to the dark heart of history."—The Times (London)

“Hilary Mantel has written an epic of English history that does what the Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the Russians . . . As Cromwell approaches his end, cast off by an ungrateful master, Mantel pulls together the strands of his life into a sublime tapestry."—The Telegraph (UK)

“Another masterpiece of historical fiction . . . The Mirror & the Light is superb, right to the last crimson drop . . . A complex, insightful exploration of power, sex, loyalty, friendship, religion, class and statecraft . . . A stunning conclusion to one of the great trilogies of our times."—Independent (UK)

“Mantel’s prose is steadily and quietly luminous, occasionally delivering unforgettable surprises . . . This is a worthy conclusion to what is undoubtedly one of the great historical fictions of the age, sustaining clarity, tension and depth with a rare consistency."—New Statesman (UK)

“Mantel’s trilogy—historically scrupulous, but quaveringly alert to more recent resonances—is one of the key achievements in English literature.”—The Spectator (UK)