Wolf Hall wins the Booker Prize
Posted by: Neil Hollands
Book groups take note: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has won the Booker Prize for 2009.
Due out in the United States on October 13th, this is probably the most accessible novel to win the award in many years. Mantel is an experienced English writer whose work has received many awards and covered many subjects. In her early career, she was a social worker in Botswana and Saudia Arabia and later a film critic before settling into life as a full time fiction writer in the 1990s. While she’s written many successful books, this will certainly be her breakout work.
Wolf Hall is historical fiction set during the reign of Henry VIII. Henry’s most powerful advisor Cardinal Wolsey is in a precarious position, as the king has asked him to find a way to get him the divorce that will allow him to marry Anne Boleyn. Into the gap that he will leave steps Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith with a reforming agenda that he will try to achieve while counseling Henry. The novel is primarily Cromwell’s story, but there’s plenty of historical intrigue and crackling dialogue with Henry, Wolsey, Boleyn, Sir Thomas More, and many others. At 620 pages, this is a longer book than most book group choices, but one that readers will, forgive me, wolf down.
