Winner of Spear's Book Awards: Novel of the Year 2009 and Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2009. Shortlisted for Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 and Independent Booksellers' Book of the Year Award: Adults' Book of the Year 2010.

"A stunning book. It breaks free of what the novel has become nowadays. I can't think of anything since Middlemarch which so convincingly builds a world." Diana Athill "A fascinating read, so good I rationed myself. It is remarkable and very learned; the texture is marvellously rich, the feel of Tudor London and the growing household of a man on the rise marvellously authentic. Characters real and imagined spring to life, from the childish and petulant King to Thomas Wolsey's jester, and it captures the extrovert, confident, violent mood of the age wonderfully." C.J. Sansom "A magnificent achievement: the scale of its vision and the fine stitching of its detail; the teeming canvas of characters; the style with its clipped but powerful immediacy; the wit, the poetry and the nuance." Sarah Dunant "A superb novel, beautifully constructed, and an absolutely compelling read. Mantel has created a novel of Tudor times which persuades us that we are there, at that moment, hungry to know what happens next. It is the making of our English world, and who can fail to be stirred by it?" Helen Dunmore

Hilary Mantel is the author of seven other novels: 'Every Day is Mother's Day' (1985), 'Vacant Possession' (1986), 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' (1988), 'Fludd' (1989), 'A Place of Greater Safety' (1992, winner of the 'Sunday Express' Book of the Year Award), 'A Change of Climate' (1994) and 'An Experiment in Love' (1995). After living abroad for a decade, in Africa and Saudi Arabia, she returned to Britain in 1986.