The year is 1535 and Thomas Cromwell, Chief Minister to Henry VIII, must work both to please the king and keep the nation safe. Anne Boleyn, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church, has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. As Henry develops a dangerous attraction to Wolf Hall’s Jane Seymour, Thomas must negotiate a ‘truth’ that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days.

Hilary Mantel CBE was born in Derbyshire in 1952 and studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She worked as a social worker before going to live in Botswana for five years and Saudi Arabia for four before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. She was awarded a CBE in 2006.

Her books include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), Fludd (1989), A Place of Greater Safety (1992), A Change of Climate (1994), Beyond Black (2005), and Wolf Hall (2009), winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Bring up the Bodies won the 2012 Man Booker Prize, making Hilary the only UK author ever to have won it twice. It also won the 2012 Costa Book of the Year making Bring Up the Bodies the first book to have been both named as Costa Book of the Year and won the Man Booker Prize in the same year.  Hilary Mantel was recently awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.