Wolf Hall
Wolf Hall (2009) is a historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate, named after the Seymour family's seat of Wolfhall, or Wulfhall, in Wiltshire. Set in the period from 1500 to 1535, Wolf Hall is a sympathetic fictionalised biography documenting the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII through to the death of Sir Thomas More. The novel won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "The 10 best historical novels". The book is the first in a trilogy; the sequel Bring Up the Bodies was published in 2012. The last book in the trilogy is The Mirror and the Light (2020), which covers the last four years of Cromwell's life.
Stats for nerds
20recommend
36mentions
31people
2011–2026years
67% recommend25% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I’m reading Wolf Hall. It’s amazing how much more history is ‘sinking in’ when told as historical fiction.
Recommended, as is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, for the same reason. Also that’s just beautifully written.
- Wolf Hall - originally a great adaptation of a superior book but the last series terribly constrained by budget and cliche background music.
Line of Duty - decent procedural but increasingly bonkers stories and hammy script/delivery.
Adolescence - well produced but liberal scare story. Netflix!
Haven't seen the others.
Hardly in the class of historical Beeb let alone contemporary US brilliance.
- Anything by Hilary Mantel is extraordinary and worth your reading time. Wolf Hall trilogy threw me into a decade-long search into who really was Thomas Cromwell, A Place of Greater Safety finally made me feel like I understand the French Revolution (I enjoyed this as an audio book on a very long drive) . Thanks to her, complex history has made sense, and how today's machinations are not much different.
- The audiobooks of the Wolf Hall trilogy are fantastic as well. They're read by Ben Miles, who played Cromwell in the RSC adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and collaborated directly with Mantel on the stage adaptation of the Mirror & The Light. His take on the character is excellent, far superior to Mark Rylance in the TV version, who I thought was badly miscast.
- C21 fiction - The Wolf Hall trilogy, Hillary Mantell; by some margin the best prose I’ve seen this century. C20 fiction - Pale Fire, Nabokov, a book to return to; Pop science - Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, a book that radically changed the way I think The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins, ditto Philosophy - Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus - Ludwig Wittgenstein - depths made clear.
- Everything that I know about Thomas Cromwell, I know from Hilary Mantel's excellent book Wolf Hall, and from the sequels.
