The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel completes the trilogy she started with her exemplary, Booker Prize-winning books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, with The Mirror & the Light. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the outcast who rises to the pinnacles of power, and paints a vivid picture of predator and prey, of a fierce struggle between the present and the past, between the will of the king and the vision of the common man, and of a modern nation forging itself through struggle, passion, and bravery. The narrative starts in May 1536 with Anne Boleyn already dead after being instantly killed by a hired French executioner. Cromwell has brunch with the winners while her remains are packed into oblivion.
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
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While his powerful master, Henry VIII, settles into a fleeting contentment with his third queen, Jane Seymour, the Putney blacksmith’s son rises from the spring’s bloodshed to begin his ascent to power and money.
Cromwell, a guy who can only rely on his wits, has no powerful family to support him and no private army. Despite internal unrest, traitorous plans from outside, and the threat of invasion, which pushes Henry’s government to the brink, Cromwell’s vivid imagination sees a new nation in the future. He had all of England at his feet, ready to be transformed by innovation and religion. Cromwell’s adversaries are gathering in the shadows as fate’s wheel spins. How long can anyone endure Henry’s ruthless and arbitrary glare is still an unanswered question.
The Mirror & the Light, which has been eight years in the making, complete Cromwell’s transformation from a self-made man to one of his era’s most feared and influential individuals. Cromwell is a complicated and fascinating character, portrayed by Mantel with tragedy and great intensity. He was a politician and a fixer, a spouse and a father, and a person who both defied and defined his age.
