The final installment, The Mirror & The Light , is as much a phenomenon as the series’ first two books - it sold 95,000 copies in its first three days and became an instant New York Times No. She “had the idea for such a long time that I kept thinking that someone else would do it,” Mantel says, but when nobody did, she charted an ambitious course: combined, the novels are nearly 1,800 pages. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, which tell Cromwell’s story up through the chilling, delicious beheading of Anne Boleyn, vaulted Mantel from relative obscurity to double Man Booker winner, a feat unmatched by any woman. That would be a relief but also impossible - Mantel, who has now spent 15 years writing her wildly best-selling, genre-defining Thomas Cromwell series, offered up so much potent information about Henry VIII’s court and his many unmerry wives (divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived), I can’t imagine how we’d replicate the conversation. Hilary Mantel is so polite and cheery that, in the brief 20-minute interlude in which I thought our entire hour-long interview didn’t record, she tells me it’s no problem at all, to ring her up in 15 minutes at her home on the Devon coast, and we’ll just do the whole thing again.
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