2020 Shortlist Readings: Hilary Mantel & Angie Cruz
The Women’s Prize Trust is delighted to present the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and our first ever fully digital...
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, Jane Seymour.
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 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 and 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.
Podcast
Listen to Zing Tsjeng speak to the six incredible authors shortlisted for the 2020 Prize
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Maggie O'Farrell
Bernardine Evaristo
Natalie Haynes
Angie Cruz
Hilary Mantel
Jenny Offill
Natalie Haynes
Candice Carty-Williams
Hilary Mantel
Ann Patchett
Anne Enright
Luan Goldie
Deepa Anappara
Jing-Jing Lee
Jenny Offill
Claire Lombardo
Angie Cruz
Edna O'Brien
Maggie O'Farrell
Jacqueline Woodson
Bernardine Evaristo
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Barbara Kingsolver
Ruth Ozeki
Susanna Clarke
Maggie O'Farrell
Tayari Jones
Kamila Shamsie
Naomi Alderman
Lisa McInerney
Ali Smith
Eimear McBride
A.M. Homes
Madeline Miller
Téa Obreht
Barbara Kingsolver
Marilynne Robinson
Rose Tremain
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Lionel Shriver
Andrea Levy
Valerie Martin
Ann Patchett
Kate Grenville
Linda Grant
Suzanne Berne
Carol Shields
Anne Michaels
Helen Dunmore
The Women’s Prize Trust is delighted to present the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and our first ever fully digital...
We are absolutely thrilled to reveal this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, in the Prize’s 25th year. The shortlist...
Tune into host Vick Hope and a line-up of incredible guests on our weekly podcast full of unmissable book recommendations.
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