Bring Up the Bodies (The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell 2)

This gripping sequel to Wolf Hall is the second volume of Hilary Mantel’s remarkable trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell.

England, 1535. Anne Boleyn, for whose sake Henry VIII has broken with Rome, has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. Meanwhile, Henry has developed a dangerous attraction to Jane Seymour. The king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, must negotiate a ‘truth’ that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge unscathed from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days.

"Mantel is a modern storyteller, making no attempt to imitate the language of the period. But she often writes poetically, evoking (or should we say creating?) the beauties and the sordidness, the tenderness and the cruelty of the Tudor world … Cromwell is entangled in complex webs of intrigue and religious strife, of personal dramas that have international repercussions. His master King Henry is a shifty character, lacking self-knowledge, constantly and casuistically looking for loopholes in the law, for ways in which he can justify to himself if to no one else the courses of action that he wishes to pursue in order to fulfil his sexual and dynastic desires...Though Cromwell is a master politician, keeping his head down when others are in danger of losing theirs, he is not without personal motives in what he does."  -  Stanley Wells, The New York Review Of Books

Hilary Mantel has both won the Booker Prize twice - with Wolf Hall (2009), and Bring Up the Bodies (2012).  Mantel was a highly-regarded novelist long before winning the Booker but becoming only the third novelist – after J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey – to scoop it twice raised her profile to stratospheric heights.