The Mirror & the Light

audio cd

Published March 10, 2020 by Macmillan Audio.

ISBN:
978-1-4272-8951-3
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The Mirror & The Light is a historical novel by English writer Hilary Mantel. Following Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), it is the final instalment in her trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, minister in the court of King Henry VIII, covering the last four years of his life, from 1536 until his death by execution in 1540.

Mantel's twelfth novel, her first in almost eight years, The Mirror & The Light was published in March 2020 to widespread critical acclaim, and enjoyed brisk sales. In December 2020, Emily Temple of Literary Hub reported that the novel had made 13 lists of the best books of 2020. It won 2021 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

22 editions

Review of 'The Mirror & the Light' on 'Goodreads'

It took me close to a year to finish this one -- I grabbed the Kindle version shortly after getting my Paperwhite. Wolf Hall was one of my first Kindle ebooks back in the day. Like Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, I thoroughly enjoyed the imagery, the details of England in the reign of Henry VIII; however, it's a long book (over 700 pages) and the cast of characters as usual was hard to track at times, and slowed me down. I also was of course dreading Cromwell's inevitable downfall and execution, which was rapid, although foreshadowed in numerous ways in the previous years before.