And who knew Cromwell was a foodie? Cromwell's musings on food throughout the three books, though not by any means a dominant thread, are so well written you can almost taste the offerings. Given its critical and commercial triumph, it’s easy to forget there was no guarantee that the Wolf Hall trilogy would succeed, considering what a huge undertaking it was to offer a new perspective on such a familiar story. Me pasa con los libros que tengo que encontrarles un ritmo, y en esta ida tan frenética que llevamos, y de la que nos hemos visto obligados a hacer un parón por culpa del Coronavirus, a veces lo pierdo. Como con la bici, encontrarle el ritmo a leer es cuestión de volver a empezar, nunca se olvida, y sabía yo que esta semana santa me lo iba a devolver... me alegro mucho de que haya sido con Amapolas en Octubre. The trilogy consists of three historical political novels set during the reign of Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell. I have just finished the last one, The Mirror and the Light, and even the ending is not disappointing. Of course, you know what's going to happen to the main character from the onset, but it's still riveting. Entre una habitación de hospital y una librería de ensueño, llamada JO, discurre la vida de una mujer, Carolina, que, a punto de alcanzar la cuarentena, se encuentra en una auténtica encrucijada: sus padres, alrededor de los cuales gravita su vida entera, han sufrido un terrible accidente. Su padre ha fallecido y su madre, consciente pero sin habla, se recupera en una clínica.

Mantel didn’t get to the Tudors until decades after the thought of writing about Cromwell had first crossed her mind. As she explained in her Reith Lectures, ‘For most of my career I wrote about odd and marginal people. They were psychic. Or religious. Or institutionalised. Or social workers. Or French. My readers were a small and select band, until I decided to march on to the middle ground of English history and plant a flag.’

Toys

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. 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. Goods that by reason of their nature, cannot be returned - (Items such as underwear, where the 'hygiene patch' has been removed, or cosmetics where the seal has been broken). 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. In theory, the rules of the game he’s playing should have meant that Cromwell couldn’t reach those heights – just as, a generation earlier, the Tudors should never have won the crown - but, moment by moment, Mantel shows us what it’s like to stake everything on shaping a future that no one, not even the most brilliant mind in the room, can see,’ she continues. ‘Writing history always requires imagination: working out what sources don’t say, as well as what they do (or might, or could) – filling in gaps where pieces of the puzzle are missing.

Having read extensively around the Tudor period, James says when he came across Wolf Hall his first thought was: ‘What new thing could possibly be said about this?’ 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’. 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.

Christmas Cards & Gift Wrap

This series truly has everything. Compelling characters, sharp, witty prose, and a gripping, high-stakes setting. The Tudor period has undeniably been done to death in all forms of historical fiction, but Hilary Mantel breathed new life into it with her unique take on the previously much-maligned Cromwell. On the one hand, I do commend the editing. The story was easy enough to follow even though the originals are pretty dense (I've read the first book some years before). I think it was still a good piece of writing.

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. The first, Wolf Hall, was the best. I could not put any of them down, though. Got the first two from the library; had to actually buy the third (The Mirror and the Light) when the library's HOLD list would have meant a wait of . . . months at least. Some of the most beloved literary characters in the world come from popular book series - just think about the likes of Harry Potter, Lyra Belacqua and Arya Stark - and there’s a reason that many of these characters’ stories have been adapted to big budget film and TV productions. They have the luxury of time to reel you in and make you feel like you’re part of the world they’re depicting. The result is that you’re totally invested in the characters and their journeys, and you’re always left wanting to know more.

Creative Play

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! This audiobook is one of those rare delights. All three books in the trilogy, expertly narrated with a separate additional listening guide.

That combination of taking something that is so firmly in the public consciousness and seeing it as though for the first time, combining it with a deftness in her handling of the source material, ensured that Wolf Hall instantly impressed the critics.Qué regalo de libro... qué regalo para estos días en los que creemos que nos falta todo, cuando no es verdad... los que somos afortunados ya lo sabíamos, pero a veces hace falta que nos den un empujoncito. Que este libro lo sea para vosotros. 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.