The Mirror & The Light covers the period following the death of Anne Boleyn in 1536. It is the final novel published in Mantel's lifetime. It won the 2021 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. In December 2020, Emily Temple of Literary Hub reported that the novel had made 13 lists of the best books of 2020. Mantel's twelfth novel, her first in almost eight years, The Mirror & The Light was published in March 2020 to widespread critical acclaim, and enjoyed brisk sales. Following Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), it is the final instalment in her trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, minister in the court of King Henry VIII, covering the last four years of his life, from 1536 until his death by execution in 1540. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.The Mirror & The Light is a historical novel by the English writer Hilary Mantel. With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour.Ĭromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on he has no great family to back him, no private army. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors.

Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner.

The mirror and the light