Hilary Mantel wins Walter Scott historical fiction prize for Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel wins Walter Scott historical fiction prize for Wolf Hall
This is a must read book: extraordinary -
There have been maybe still are cheap copies for sale in BigW, at least - if you can't wait to read it and want to own a copy to pass around among your friends.


Here is an account of Wolf Hall from

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - check out more detail there and also follow through to look up Hilary Mantel and her other writings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Hall

Wolf Hall (2009) is a novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate. It won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.^[1][2] Set in the 1520s and 1530s, the novel is about the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the Tudor court of King Henry VIII. Born to a lower-class family of no position or name, Cromwell first became the right-hand of Cardinal Wolsey, and then, after Wolsey's fall from grace, the chief minister to Henry VIII. In that role, he oversaw the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, and Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn. He was widely hated in his lifetime, and historical and literary accounts in the subsequent centuries have not been kind to Cromwell; in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, for example, he is portrayed as the calculating, unprincipled opposite of Thomas More's honour and rectitude.

Mantel's novel offers a corrective to that impression, an intimate and more rounded portrait of Cromwell and the political machinations of Henry's court. Mantel spent five years researching and writing the book, and the trickiest part, she said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal,^[3] was trying to match her version to the historical record. To avoid contradicting history, she created a card catalogue, organized alphabetically by character, with each card containing notes showing where a particular historical figure was on relevant dates. "You really need to know, where is the Duke of Suffolk at the moment? You can't have him in London if he's supposed to be somewhere else," she explained.

The title comes from the name of the Seymours' family seat Wolfhall or Wulfhall in Wiltshire; the title's allusion to the old Latin saying "Man is wolf to man" serves as a constant reminder of the dangerously opportunistic nature of the world through which Cromwell navigates.^[4]