A photography book that is a vital accompaniment to the many fans of Hilary Mantel’s bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy
‘At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, ‘’In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it.’’ The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context . . . Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer’s head. This book has made some of them visible.’ Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel, Ben Miles, the stage’s celebrated Thomas Cromwell, and his brother, photographer George Miles, spent many years exploring the locations we know Thomas Cromwell visited and inhabited – Putney, Austin Friars, Wolf Hall, the Tower of London – to capture the faint traces of Tudor England and his extraordinary life. Accompanied with extracts from The Wolf Hall Trilogy, some of them published here for the first time, and including a stunning new essay by its author, these photographs reveal a world that is shadowy, frightening, sometimes whimsical – a portrait of a country in conversation with its past.
‘The present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released. Among other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history; of the gaps in the record; its elusive nature; and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives’ Guardian
Review
Praise for the Wolf Hall trilogy
‘The most masterful story telling imaginable’ Graham Norton
‘Very few writers manage not just to excavate the sedimented remains of the past, but bring them up again into the light and air so that they shine brightly once more before us. Hilary Mantel has done just that’ Simon Schama, Financial Times
‘Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels make 99 per cent of contemporary literary fiction feel utterly pale and bloodless by comparison’ The Times
‘So original and disconcerting that it will surely come to be seen as a paradigm-shifter’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Hers are books that refuse to shy away from the underside of life … Hilary Mantel is one of our bravest as well as our most brilliant writers’ Olivia Laing, Observer
‘It is the making of our English world, and who can fail to be stirred by it?’ Helen Dunmore, author of Birdcage Walk
‘Succeeds brilliantly in every particle … it’s an imaginative achievement to exhaust superlatives’ Spectator
‘Mantel in the voice of Cromwell is inspired. When she is in full flow as a novelist, creating scenes and inventing dialogue, she is more convincing than rendering a recorded scene from history’ Philippa Gregory, Sunday Express
‘Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of . . . Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century’ Observer, Stephanie Merritt
About the Author
Hilary Mantel is the author of fifteen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her latest novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize.
Ben Miles is an actor whose association with Thomas Cromwell began in 2013, playing him in the stage adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. In 2020, he co-wrote the stage adaptation of The Mirror And The Light with Hilary Mantel, appearing again as Cromwell in the play the following year.
George Miles is an artist whose photographs focus on our relationship to place and the everyday. He has published numerous photography books, and his work is exhibited and held in collections around the world.
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