We Recommend: Wolf Hall

"It's a story (...) about power."
"Though set in Henry's court and, overwhelmingly, about his long, panting battle to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, Wolf Hall is really the story of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's boy who became the king's right-hand man. When we first meet Thomas, he is sprawled on the floor, bloody and beaten. His father, drunken Walter, has just put the boot in and not for the first time. "Inch by inch forward," he orders himself, as he crawls, spewing and fainting, resolutely out of the life he was born to."
"Immune to the courtiers' disgust, this pirate from the Putney riverbank ascends through the ranks to become Henry's most trusted guide. Eventually, even the bitter Duke of Norfolk comes to rely on him. After all, what can't he do? He knows the whole New Testament by heart; "He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." If anyone can free the king from the trusses of his marriage, it is the blacksmith's son."
"The church protects its interests by murdering dissenters; reading the Bible in English is a crime punishable by death. This is what lies behind Henry's struggle with the Pope: the England of the common man, who can be ripped limb from limb for daring to suggest that "God on the altar is a piece of bread". By centring her narrative on the humane and free-thinking Thomas Cromwell, who believes in kindness, tolerance and education, Mantel has found a way to reconfigure the tired tale of Henry's lust and what it led to. Henry might want a son so desperately that he is willing to make war with the Pope, but Cromwell, who dreams of a nation that can talk and learn and worship freely, is revealed as the true author of England's independence."
It won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
(Review by Olivia Laing in The Guardian, 26 April 2009)