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The Wolf Hall Picture Book

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Hers are books that refuse to shy away from the underside of life … Hilary Mantel is one of our bravest as well as our most brilliant writers’ Olivia Laing, Observer I am, as I think a lot of authors are, concerned about the speed at which we are consuming history now, the way that the past, the very recent past, is being made into a version and real-life people walking around have to live with their representatives and so on,” she says, not naming names, but nodding when I mention the TV series The Crown and Kenneth Branagh’s imminent appearance as Boris Johnson in This England. Eagerly awaited and years in the making, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will trace the final four years of Cromwell’s life, completing his journey from self-made man to the most feared, influential figure of his time. Cromwell is as complex as he is unforgettable: a politician and a fixer, a diplomat and a father, a man who both defied and defined his age.

The first half of the novel, built around Wolsey's fall from power, details Cromwell's domestic setup at Austin Friars and introduces the major players in Tudor politics. Without clobbering the reader with the weight of her research, Mantel works up a 16th-century world in which only a joker would call for cherries in April or lettuce in December, and where hearing an unlicensed preacher is an illicit thrill on a par with risking syphilis. The civil wars that brought the Tudors to the throne still make older people shudder, bringing Henry's obsession with producing a male heir into focus. And the precarious nature of early modern life is brought home by the abrupt deaths of Cromwell's wife and daughters, carried off by successive epidemics in moving but unsentimentally staged scenes. Cromwell asks if he can bury his elder daughter with a copybook she's written her name in; "the priest says he has never heard of such a thing". So original and disconcerting that it will surely come to be seen as a paradigm-shifterSunday Telegraph

Susanne Simpson, Executive Producer of Masterpiece says: “I am incredibly proud to bring Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light to Masterpiece and the American audience. It is thrilling that such brilliant actors as Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis will reprise their roles for this final chapter of Thomas Cromwell’s story. The level of excellence on and off screen for this series is incomparable.” In both recollections he stays after the onlookers have dispersed but in the second, stray dogs appear, and they are even more frightening than the humans. First the men, then the beasts. And he realises something new: that a version of himself has been left behind there, “at the wrong end of time”, and that the person who returned home was different. Mantel is preparing to leave Devon to set up home with her husband, Gerald McEwen, in Ireland this month, having previously expressed her shame at the British government’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and her desire to become an Irish citizen. She has become a byword for a particular kind of intensely-felt, brilliantly subtle exploration of the past. 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.

Succeeds brilliantly in every particle … it’s an imaginative achievement to exhaust superlativesSpectator Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire on 6 July 1952. She studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University, and went on to become a social work assistant in a geriatric hospital. Mantel married the geologist Gerald McEwan in 1972. The couple divorced in 1981 but remarried in 1982. In 1974, she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, which was published in 1992 as A Place of Greater Safety. In 1977, Mantel and her husband moved to Botswana, living there for five years. Later, they spent four years in Saudi Arabia, returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have been the only consecutive novels by a writer to have both won the Booker prize, and Mantel was closely involved in their transition to stages in Stratford, London and New York, also seeing them adapted for BBC television. She also published, in 2014, a collection of short stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.The result is a collection of ambiguous, disquieting images in which the present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released. Colin Callender, CEO of Playground, says “Following the success of the BAFTA and Golden Globe winning original television adaptation of the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy, we are thrilled and honoured that, nine years later, we have been able re-unite Peter Kosminsky and his brilliant team, in front of and behind the camera, to bring Thomas Cromwell ‘s final chapter to the screen. Intimate, thrilling, and deeply moving, The Mirror and the Light shines a fresh light on the politics of power and the personal price paid by those who wield it. Cromwell’s story is as contemporary as ever – a story of loyalty and betrayal that just happens to be about people 500 years ago.” When asked by the Financial Times earlier this month whether she believed in an afterlife, Mantel said she did, but that she could not imagine how it might work. “However, the universe is not limited by what I can imagine,” she said.

Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of . . . Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this centuryObserver, Stephanie Merritt’ -Hilary Mantel with Ben Miles (centre), an actor, and his brother, George, a photographer, with whom she collaborated to create The Wolf Hall Picture Book. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian Many have tweeted tributes to Mantel following her death. Writer and broadcaster Damian Barr said her death is “such a loss”. The present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released. Among other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history; of the gaps in the record; its elusive nature; and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives’ Guardian Critical Praise

The inevitable question remains: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s cruel and capricious gaze?But the book is not an attempt on Mantel’s part to draw parallels with contemporary life. She was, she says, persistently bemused when people suggested to her, for example, that Boris Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings resembles Cromwell. “I would think: no, not in any way.

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