Hilary Mantel Books in Order

About

Dame Hilary Mantel (1952–2022) was the first woman and the first British author to win the Booker Prize twice — for Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) — and the Thomas Cromwell trilogy she spent seventeen years writing stands as one of the great achievements of 21st-century literary fiction. The trilogy concludes with The Mirror & the Light (2020), which was Booker-longlisted and published two years before Mantel’s death in September 2022. The BBC adapted all three novels for television, with Mark Rylance playing Cromwell in performances widely considered definitive. Mantel also wrote a celebrated memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003), and the supernatural novel Beyond Black (2005).

Mantel’s prose is immediately distinctive and difficult to imitate. She writes the Cromwell novels in present tense and third person, with “he” almost always referring to Cromwell — a choice that immerses the reader in his consciousness without the usual narrative distance. Her sentences are compressed and rhythmically controlled, and she treats the 16th-century Tudor court with the same texture and psychological specificity that contemporary literary fiction applies to modern life. The effect is to make the past feel viscerally present: these are not costumed historical figures but people with recognizable inner lives, ambitions, fears, and capacity for self-deception. Henry VIII’s court, in her hands, reads like a modern political thriller.

Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, and trained as a lawyer before turning to writing. She spent years in Botswana and Saudi Arabia with her geologist husband, and she struggled for much of her adult life with endometriosis that was misdiagnosed for years and left her in chronic pain. Those years of illness — of being dismissed, of having her experience denied by medical authority — are everywhere in her fiction: in Wolf Hall’s Cromwell navigating a court that can change the rules without warning, in Beyond Black’s medium haunted by spirits she did not choose. Her understanding of power — how it works, who it protects, who it destroys — comes from having spent years without it.

“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry it with us.” Readers connect with Mantel because she makes the past a mirror for the present without sacrificing its foreignness. Thomas Cromwell — a blacksmith’s son who became the second most powerful man in England and was executed when he ceased to be useful — is recognizable to anyone who has worked in an institution and understood that skill and loyalty are not protection against the whims of those above you. The Cromwell trilogy is a meditation on ambition, pragmatism, and survival, and it happens to be set in the 16th century.