Wolf Hall
Mantel used the present tense and a pronoun trick to put you inside Cromwell's skull. It works. You will not be the same after reading it.
The Rise of Thomas Cromwell
Hilary Mantel's 2009 Booker Prize winner follows Thomas Cromwell from his brutal childhood through his ascent to become Henry VIII's most trusted adviser during the years of Anne Boleyn's rise and the break with Rome. Mantel's Cromwell is not the villain of popular imagination but a self-made pragmatist of extraordinary intelligence navigating a court where one wrong word means execution. Written in an unconventional present tense that places the reader inside Cromwell's consciousness, the novel changed what historical fiction could do. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies won again in 2012.
Reading Wolf Hall
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"He sits back, watching him. What do you think, he says, when a man you know shows you his worst self?
"Hilary Mantel
Mantel said she began the novel because she was tired of historical fiction that treated Cromwell as a cartoon villain. She spent years in the British Library reading primary sources before writing a word.
Mantel became the first woman and the first person to win the Booker Prize twice with the same characters when Bring Up the Bodies won in 2012. She was working on the third volume The Mirror and the Light when she died in 2022.