Wolf Hall
Wolf HallHilary Mantel
Buy on Amazon

Wolf Hall (2009)

Hilary Mantel

Others: Mixed

Wolf Hall (2009) is a historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate, named after the Seymour family's seat of Wolfhall, or Wulfhall, in Wiltshire. Set in the period from 1500 to 1535, Wolf Hall is a sympathetic fictionalised biography documenting the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII through to the death of Sir Thomas More. The novel won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "The 10 best historical novels". The book is the first in a trilogy; the sequel Bring Up the Bodies was published in 2012. The last book in the trilogy is The Mirror and the Light (2020), which covers the last four years of Cromwell's life.

ISBN:
9780008381691
Length:
653 pages

Genres: historical fiction

Lists: …

Similar books

1 of 6
  • Longbourn

    Jo Baker

    2013 · 366 pages · 5 reviews

    Others: Overwhelmingly positive

    The servants at Longbourn estate, only glancingly mentioned in Jane Austen's classic, take center stage in Jo Baker's new novel. Here are the Bennets as we have never known them, seen through the eyes of those scrubbing the floors, cooking the meals, emptying the chamber pots. Our heroine is Sarah, an orphaned housemaid beginning to chafe against the boundaries of her class. When the militia marches into town, a new footman arrives under mysterious circumstances, and Sarah finds herself the object of the attentions of an ambitious young former slave working at neighboring Netherfield Hall, the carefully choreographed world downstairs at Longbourn threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, up-ended. From the stern (but soft-hearted housekeeper) to the starry-eyed kitchen maid, these new characters come to life.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also historical fiction
    53%
    On 5+ of the same lists
    42%
    Similar descriptions
    5%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • The Remains of the Day

    Kazuo Ishiguro

    1989 · 245 pages · 7 reviews

    Others: Mostly positive

    In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also historical fiction
    57%
    On 5+ of the same lists
    36%
    Similar descriptions
    7%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • The Known World

    Edward P. Jones

    2003 · 394 pages · 3 reviews

    Others: Positive

    Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend estate, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges seamlessly between the past and future and back again to the present, The Known World weaves together the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, whites, and Indians -- and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also historical fiction
    54%
    On 5+ of the same lists
    42%
    Similar descriptions
    4%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • Beloved

    Toni Morrison

    1987 · 288 pages · 3 reviews

    Others: Mostly positive

    Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also historical fiction
    62%
    On 5+ of the same lists
    28%
    A creator reacted alike
    10%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • The Song of Achilles

    Madeline Miller

    2011 · 379 pages · 23 reviews

    Others: Mostly positive

    This is the story of the seige of Troy from the perspective of Achilles best-friend Patroclus. Although Patroclus is outcast from his home for disappointing his father he manages to be the only mortal who can keep up with the half-God Archilles. Even though many will know the facts behind the story the telling is fresh and engaging.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also historical fiction
    61%
    On 5+ of the same lists
    29%
    A creator reacted alike
    10%
    Personalize your recommendations
  • The Women

    Kristin Hannah

    2024 · 476 pages · 10 reviews

    Others: Leaning positive

    Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets―and becomes one of―the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost. But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

    Why?

    What made the match, strongest first

    Also historical fiction
    64%
    On 5+ of the same lists
    25%
    A creator reacted alike
    11%
    Personalize your recommendations

Reviews4

Loved it

an incredibly ambitious historical novel written in a very peculiar style that's challenging slightly difficult but also intuitive to learn it's the type of book that teaches you how to read it as you progress