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Average rating4.3
“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 blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s 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 Henry’s regime to the breaking point, Cromwell’s 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 & 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 man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion, and courage.
--front flap
Featured Series
3 primary booksThomas Cromwell is a 3-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2009 with contributions by Hilary Mantel.
Reviews with the most likes.
I absolutely loved Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, so my excitement for The Mirror & The Light was on par with many of yours. I ordered the 4th Estate hardback, got the Kindle edition and Audible audiobook as soon as they became available, and got going.
I'm putting this on hold for the time being. I'm almost 200 pages in, and it's been quite a slog. The first two books had such fervent momentum going on that I'm finding it quite difficult to get this one going.
I'm rereading Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and loving every page of it (halfway through the second volume after starting the first one in late February), which offers an interesting counterpoint to my experiences so far with this book. I'll return to this later, maybe in the summer.
I read this book less carefully than the other two in the trilogy, a little more distractedly (pandemic reading), so I don't have substantive comments. I'm sad that Hilary Mantel is done writing this trilogy and that I am done reading it.