Wolf Hall Trilogy 3 Books Collection Set By Hilary Mantel (The Mirror and the Light, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies)

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The BBC andMasterpiece PBS have announced that Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, based on the final novel in Hilary Mantel’s multi award-winning trilogy, will begin filming shortly.The six-part series will air on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK. Then again, some plot points obviously won't punch as hard if things are accelerated (about 2-3-fold). And I do like all the stuff that makes historical fiction lengthy - the setting and little details and everything. And I liked the first two narrators more than the last one. And then, of course, there was the Booker Prize win, although the judges were split. BBC broadcaster Jim Naughtie, who chaired the 2009 judging panel, said: ‘Our decision was based on the sheer bigness of the book, the boldness of its narrative and scene-setting, the gleam that there is in its detail.’ But Mantel wasn’t just telling Cromwell’s life story, she was humanising him, inviting us to see the world through him. (‘In fiction you’re exploring the unconscious of history,’ she said a few years ago.) Crucially, by writing in the present tense, she was presenting him as a man who has no idea what’s coming next, even though the reader knows exactly how events are going to play out. Mantel thus creates suspense in a story that in theory should contain very little.

And oh yes – because the first two books have both individually won the Booker Prize. Of course what we ultimately want from the final book is a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy but it is hard not to get a teensy bit excited about the fact that she could win the Booker again. But more about that later – the book hasn’t even been released yet! Readers and critics alike found Mantel’s approach an original and welcome addition to Tudor fiction, as it offered something genuinely different and unfamiliar. Historian Thomas Penn, author of Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England, says that while ‘the Tudors have always been box-office… Hilary Mantel’s novels have allowed people to imagine them in a new light’. As Mantel herself noted, ‘There were shelves full of novels about Henry VIII and his wives, but a novelist can’t resist an unexplored angle. Change the viewpoint, and the story is new.’

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That said, sometimes it’s equally enjoyable to delve right into a certain story and get to know its characters inside out over multiple books. For that reason, a good book series is a must-have on the shelf of any bookworm. I’m a major fan of Tudor History and as a general rule, I now only ever read non-fiction books on the subject, but the Wolf Hall trilogy is an exception. Unless readers are totally opposed to historical fiction of any kind, Tudor fans should find the trilogy (or at least what we’ve been able to read of it so far!) intelligent, clever and haunting. May, 1536. Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, is dead. As the axe drops, Thomas Cromwell emerges from the bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. Esta reseña podría subtitularse "el sueño que se convirtió librería, en libro y en familia", porque sin querer desvelar mucho de la historia, de alguna forma no pueden existir el uno sin el otro y sin la una. Y es que, desde hace apenas un año, somos muchos los que hemos podido descubrir ese rinconcito mágico que es la librería de Amapolas en Octubre en la calle Pelayo. When Mantel published Wolf Hall, she was 57 years old and the author of nine previous novels. Extraordinarily various, they were the output of a writer with very dark wit, who seemed unconcerned about courting popularity. She had always been in love with the sheer complexity of history. Her preparation for the Wolf Hall trilogy was her 1992 historical novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. This vast, multi-viewpoint narrative was almost too much: Mantel was overwhelmingly knowledgable, but this perhaps taught her that a novel with a huge cast of characters needed a single focus, one character before whose eyes history unfolds.

It took a while to hit her stride. She was drawn to historical fiction from the start, but, as she said in her 2017 Reith Lectures, ‘I was subject to a cultural cringe. I felt I was morally inferior to historians and artistically inferior to real novelists, who could do plots.’ In the mid-Seventies she wrote a novel about the French Revolution, but was unable to find publisher to take it on. At the time, historical fiction, she said later, ‘wasn’t respected or respectable’. One agent turned it down, she said, because they expected that it was ‘bound to be about ladies with high hair’. (The book, A Place of Greater Safety, was eventually published in 1992.) The third book has the high quality of the previous 2, so will be a very strong contender in this years prizes. Not having read the first book since it was first released, and plodding my way through it at the time, this was the perfect way to work my way through the whole story from start to finish.Cromwell’s ending may be common knowledge, but Mantel still managed to maintain both her readers’ and the critics’ enthusiasm for his story over a period of 11 years. I actually got chills when I saw the billboard in Leicester Square with the Tudor Rose and the words ‘So now get up.’ I was so excited to get my hands on The Mirror and the Light after 8 years of waiting!