Description: Set during the French Revolution, this "riveting historical novel" ("The New Yorker") is the story of three young provincials who together helped destroy a way of life and, in the process, destroyed themselves.
Brief description: Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.
Review Quotes:
"Mantel's writing is so exact and brilliant that, in itself, it seems an act of survival, even redemption."
--The New Yorker
--Zadie Smith, author of On Beauty "Brilliant, edgy historical fiction that captures the whiplash flux of the French Revolution with crisp immediacy on the page."
--The Seattle Times "An epic of extraordinary detail and depth . . . [it] moves beyond the realm of an absorbing yarn into the arena of a literary masterpiece."
--Booklist