Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall is a historical novel by the English writer Hilary Mantel, first published in 2009, the first installment of her trilogy tracing the career of Thomas Cromwell. Narrated largely from Cromwell's own perspective in a close, present-tense third person, the novel follows his rise from an obscure and violent childhood as a blacksmith's son in Putney, through years as a soldier and merchant on the European continent, to his emergence in the 1520s and 1530s as the indispensable chief minister of King Henry VIII, tracing his service first under the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey and then his own ascent as Henry seeks to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The novel covers the period from Wolsey's fall through the breach with Rome, the establishment of Henry as head of the Church of England, and Cromwell's central role in engineering the king's divorce and remarriage, ending as Anne Boleyn's own position begins to grow precarious, a fall Mantel would go on to narrate in the trilogy's second volume, Bring Up the Bodies. Praised for reimagining Cromwell, long cast in earlier fiction such as Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons as a scheming villain, as a complex, sympathetic and formidably capable self-made man, the novel won the 2009 Booker Prize, and Mantel became the first woman to win the prize twice when its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, also won in 2012.