A Novel by Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall

2009 · Man Booker Prize

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“Beneath every history, another history.”

The Novel

Published in 2009, Wolf Hallis Hilary Mantel’s masterpiece — a historical novel that transformed the genre. It tells the story of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who rose to become the most powerful man in England during the reign of Henry VIII. Through Cromwell’s eyes, we witness the break with Rome, the divorce of Catherine of Aragon, the rise of Anne Boleyn, and the English Reformation — events that reshaped the Western world.

Mantel’s revolutionary technique — present tense, close third person — places the reader inside Cromwell’s mind. You don’t watch history unfold; you experience it as if for the first time, not knowing what will happen next, even though you know the history. The novel won the Man Booker Prize and went on to sell over a million copies, launching a trilogy that would take eleven years and nearly two thousand pages to complete.

“He is at home in this room, this street, this world. He can turn his hand to anything: he can draft a contract, fell a tree, break a horse, cook a meal. The world is not strange to him; he is at home in it.”