Historical Fiction

1939: On the eve of war, young English heiress Grace Grey travels from London to the wilderness of Tasmania.

Coaxed out of her shell by the attentions of her Irish neighbour, Daniel – Grace finally learns to live. But when Australian forces are called to the frontline, and Daniel with them, he leaves behind a devastating secret which will forever bind them together.

1975: Artist Willow Hawkins, and her new husband, Ben, can’t believe their luck when an anonymous benefactor leaves them a house on the remote Tasmanian coast. Confused and delighted, they set out to unmask Towerhurst’s previous owner – unwittingly altering the course of their lives.

2004: Libby Andrews has always been sheltered from the truth behind her father Ben’s death.

When she travels to London and discovers a faded photograph, a long-buried memory is unlocked, and she begins to follow an investigation that Ben could never complete. But will she realise that some secrets are best left buried . . .?

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea … Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, imagines a new life in the big city … George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Food, marries his Irish bride, Annie, in the cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms.

Now these people exist only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough. Simon Mawer puts flesh on our ancestors’ bones to bring them to life and give them voice. There is birth and death; there is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit.

Yet the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known – the unbreakable bond of family.

‘Utterly absorbing, cleverly constructed and beautifully written’ The Times

‘Moving and exhilarating’ Spectator

‘Evokes the messiness and fragility of everyday life in the nineteenth century’ Daily Mail

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.

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020; Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020;

‘Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history … and what a show‘ The Times