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Goldsboro Books

9780007480999

The Mirror and the Light - Longlisted for Booker Prize 2020

The Mirror and the Light - Longlisted for Booker Prize 2020

by Hilary Mantel

Publisher 4th Estate

Genre: Historical Fiction

Released:

  • Signed by the Author
  • UK First Edition
  • First Printing
  • Hardcover


Regular price £300.00
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  • Professionally Packed

    All of our books that have a dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

  • Book Condition & Notes

    Signed on a tip-in page. Comes with a promo booklet. Strictly 1 copy per customer.

About the book

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, Jane Seymour.

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?

With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring 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.

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About the Author

Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is an English writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories.


She has twice been awarded the Booker Prize, the first time for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and secondly for the 2012 novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second instalment of the Cromwell trilogy.


Mantel was the first woman to receive the award twice, following in the footsteps of J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, and J.G. Farrell (who posthumously won the Lost Man Booker Prize). The third instalment to the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was released on 5th March 2020 in the UK.

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