Hilary Mantel's Tudor trilogy
Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume in Hilary Mantel's Tudor trilogy, has just appeared:
Ms. Mantel everywhere displays an easy ability to show us characters' depths in quick flashes, as when Cromwell thinks about the exiled Queen Katherine: "If she is ill in the night, perhaps she dreams of the gardens of the Alhambra, where she grew up; the marble pavements, the bubbling of crystal waters into basins, the drag of a white peacock's tail and the scent of lemons." It's an almost photographic concision employed in virtually no other historical fiction currently being written, one that makes "Bring Up the Bodies" a. . .propulsive reading experience. . .
Henry VIII ad Anne Boleyn continue to fascinate. Mantel received the Man Booker Prize for her first Tudor novel, Wolf Hall.
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