Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is set between 1500 and 1535 and follows the rise of Thomas Cromwell. It opens with the teenage Cromwell running away from home to escape an abusive father and making his way as a soldier in France. By 1527 he is back in England, a well-travelled lawyer and a married father of three who is respected as the right-hand man of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and known for getting difficult deals done. His wife and two daughters die suddenly of the sweating sickness, leaving him a widower, and his sister-in-law Johane comes to keep house for him. In 1529 Wolsey falls out of favour with the king, and Cromwell has to work out how to survive his patron's fall.

The novel follows Cromwell through the court of Henry VIII, and it ends with the death of Sir Thomas More; it stays inside his own head: the household he keeps, the accounts he manages, the people he protects and the ones he moves out of the way. At the centre of the book is the king's need for a male heir and the marriage to Catherine of Aragon that stands in the way of it.

Wolf Hall was published in 2009 by Fourth Estate and takes its name from the Seymour family's seat of Wulfhall in Wiltshire. It took the Booker Prize and, from the National Book Critics Circle, its award for fiction; it is the first novel in a trilogy, followed by Bring Up the Bodies in 2012 and The Mirror and the Light in 2020.