Wolf Hall: A Novel

xxiii, 604 pp. Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A fictionalized biography of Thomas Cromwell, the first in a planned trilogy (the sequel Bring Up the Bodies was published in 2012). "England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph'"