Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall
By Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate £8.99 653 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19

Winner of last year’s Man Booker Prize, Mantel’s mammoth, vigorous novel is a colourful Tudor epic charting the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the first half of the 16th century from his humble origins as a Putney blacksmith’s son. Bullied by his drunken father, young Cromwell periodically ran away from home, ultimately to sea, returning as a relatively affluent merchant. With political nous and a canny business head, he becomes Cardinal Wolsey’s fixer and gained favour in the court of King Henry VIII.

Mantel’s historical scope is both vast in context and focused in detail: for swathes of this book, Henry is trying to divorce Katherine of Aragon in favour of Anne Boleyn, and Cromwell’s role in the legal and theological machinations is gripping. Full of fascinating incident and action, and only briefly becalmed by the few doldrum passages of ornate detail, Wolf Hall takes the wily intrigues of Tudor politics at full sail.