Mirror & the Light: A Novel

If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?England, May 1536.

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

As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors.

The blacksmiths son from Putney emerges from the springs bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves.Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army.

Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henrys regime to breaking point, Cromwells robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future.

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?WithThe Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began withWolf HallandBring Up the Bodies.

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 mans vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.