Bring Up The Bodies

Author: Hilary Mantel

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $39.99 AUD
  • : 9780007315093
  • : HarperCollins Publishers Australia
  • : Fourth Estate Ltd
  • : January 2012
  • : 240mm X 159mm
  • : May 2012
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Hilary Mantel
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  • : Hardback
  • : 1205
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  • : English
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  • : 608
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Barcode 9780007315093
9780007315093

Description

The sequel to the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall. 'My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he'll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he'll cut off your leg,' says Walter Cromwell in the year 1500. 'But if you don't cut across him he's a very gentleman. And he'll stand anyone a drink.' By 1535 Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son, is far from his humble origins. Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes have risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church. But Henry's actions have forced England into dangerous isolation, and Anne has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. When Henry visits Wolf Hall, Cromwell watches as Henry falls in love with the silent, plain Jane Seymour. The minister sees what is at stake: not just the king's pleasure, but the safety of the nation. As he eases a way through the sexual politics of the court, its miasma of gossip, he must negotiate a 'truth' that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne's final days. In 'Bring up the Bodies', sequel to the Man Booker Prize-winning 'Wolf Hall', Hilary Mantel explores one of the most mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn. This new novel is a speaking picture, an audacious vision of Tudor England that sheds its light on the modern world. It is the work of one of our great writers at the height of her powers.

Awards

NZ Listener Winner 2012

Reviews

Praise for Wolf Hall: 'This is a beautiful and profoundly human book, a dark mirror held up to our own world. And the fact that its conclusion takes place after the curtain has fallen only proves that Hilary Mantel is one of our bravest as well as our most brilliant writers.' Olivia Laing, Observer 'As soon as I opened the book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop. When I did have to put it down, I was full of regret that the story was over, a regret I still feel. This is a wonderful and intelligently imagined retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle.' The Times 'Mantel is a writer who sees the skull beneath the skin, the worm in the bud, the child abuse in the suburbs and the rat in the mattress!Turning her attention to Tudor England, she makes that world at once so concrete you can smell the rain-drenched wool cloaks!This is a splendidly ambitious book!I wait greedily for the sequel, but "Wolf Hall" is already a feast.' Daily Telegraph 'A compelling and humane investigation of the cost of ambition.' Guardian 'Mantel's ability to pick out vivid scenes from sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional!Vividly alive.' London Review of Books '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's magnificent new novel' Bee Wilson, Daily Telegraph 'Magestically conjures up an England in the throes of epic change ! a Great British Novel' Hephzibah Anderson, Observer 'Mantel has produced, all round, the novel that best delivers what it promises. It never lets you down; the prose gleams and she tells the story in an original and free-flowing style that will entrap you if you let it.' The Times 'Ms Mantel's best novel yet' The Economist "Cromwell has never before appeared as he does in Hilary Mantel's dense, finely wrought 'Wolf Hall'!So convincing is she with 'Wolf Hall' that it is easy to feel that we are seeing the real Cromwell before us, transforming himself from the battered child of an abusive London blacksmith- the boy is bruised and bloodied in the novel's wrenching opening scene-into a cosmopolitan, accomplished Renaissance man! Ms. Mantel has demonstrated that, in her way with Cromwell, she is without peer." Wall Street Journal

Author description

Hilary Mantel is one of our most important living writers. She is the author of twelve books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Giving Up the Ghost, Beyond Black, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize, and Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize.