Bring Up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel
Summary
Anne Boleyn has failed to produce a son, Henry has noticed Jane Seymour, and Thomas Cromwell is asked to solve a problem that has no legal solution. Over nine months he builds a case: five men arrested, interrogated, tried and executed, and a queen beheaded on Tower Green.
Where Wolf Hall covered decades, this covers less than a year, and the narrowing is what makes it. Mantel is showing you exactly how a judicial murder is assembled out of gossip, ambition, old scores and the completely sincere belief of everyone involved that they are doing their job. Cromwell selects the accused partly on evidence and partly because they mocked his old master Wolsey in a court entertainment years earlier, and Mantel lets you see him notice that about himself.
It is faster, tighter and more frightening than its predecessor. The present tense still runs everything through Cromwell's eye, so you are inside the room with him while he decides who will die, and you like him, which is the problem the book wants you to have.
Read Wolf Hall first. This one is the easier of the two and the better constructed, and readers who bounced off the first book's opening often find that this is where the trilogy finally opens for them.
At around four hundred pages it is the shortest of the three, and the single year it covers gives it the shape of a thriller. If you know how the Tudor story ends, and everyone does, Mantel makes that inevitability into the source of the dread rather than a problem to work around.
Historical Context & Significance
Bring Up the Bodies won the Booker Prize in 2012, three years after Wolf Hall took the same prize.
The result set several records at once. Hilary Mantel became the first woman to win the Booker twice, only the third writer of any kind to do so after J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey, and the first ever to win with a sequel. No trilogy had produced two winners before.
The Cromwell books had by then become a phenomenon well beyond literary fiction, adapted for the Royal Shakespeare Company and for television, and they substantially rehabilitated a figure who had spent four centuries as the villain of the Tudor story. Mantel completed the trilogy with The Mirror and the Light in 2020, which was longlisted but did not reach the shortlist. She died in 2022.