Author Guide · Historical & Literary Fiction
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Hilary Mantel started her novel about the French Revolution at twenty-two, a year after university; A Place of Greater Safety did not come out until 1992, after four other novels. She had studied law, spent about five years in Botswana and four in Jeddah, and lived for years with severe endometriosis that doctors first treated as a psychiatric illness. Then, in her fifties, she wrote Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and became the first woman and the first British writer to win the Booker Prize twice. The Cromwell trilogy has sold more than five million copies. She died in 2022, aged seventy. This guide covers her twelve key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1985–2020 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Hilary Mantel’s best-known books are the Thomas Cromwell trilogy: Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), which both won the Booker Prize, and The Mirror & the Light (2020). Start with Wolf Hall. Before Cromwell she wrote nine other books of fiction, including Beyond Black (2005), and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003).
Where to Start with Hilary Mantel
If you want her defining book
→ Wolf Hall (2009) — the first Cromwell novel and her first Booker.
If you want the French Revolution
→ A Place of Greater Safety (1992) — Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins, the book she began at twenty-two.
If you want something contemporary and darkly funny
→ Beyond Black (2005) — a suburban medium and the dead who follow her.
If you want her own life
→ Giving Up the Ghost (2003) — her memoir of childhood, illness and ghosts.
12 Hilary Mantel Books, in Order
Every Day Is Mother’s Day
Her first novel, set in a northern English suburb: a widowed medium, Evelyn Axon, keeps her disturbed adult daughter Muriel hidden at home, while the social worker assigned to them has troubles of her own. It is a black comedy with something uncanny in the house, and the characters return in her second novel, Vacant Possession (1986).
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
Frances Shore, an Englishwoman, follows her engineer husband to Jeddah. Drawn from Mantel’s own years in Saudi Arabia, it turns the cultural gulf she finds there, between Saudis and Westerners and between women and men, into something close to a thriller.
Fludd
A small, grim mill town in northern England in 1956, with a priest who has lost his faith, until a mysterious new curate called Fludd arrives. He may be the Devil, or a manifestation of the seventeenth-century alchemist Robert Fludd. It won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize.
A Place of Greater Safety
A long novel of the French Revolution told through three of its leaders, Georges Danton, Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, from their provincial childhoods to the Terror. She started it at twenty-two, a year after university. It was the Sunday Express Book of the Year.
An Experiment in Love
Carmel McBain, a scholarship girl from a Catholic town in the north, starts at university in London in 1970 alongside the friend and rival she has known since childhood. A novel about class, female friendship, ambition and hunger, close to Mantel’s own years at university. It won the 1996 Hawthornden Prize.
The Giant, O’Brien
An Irish giant, based on the real Charles Byrne, comes to London in the 1780s to make money as a curiosity, while the surgeon John Hunter waits for him to die so he can take his skeleton for display. Mantel later adapted it for BBC Radio 4.
Giving Up the Ghost
Her memoir, framed by the sale of a Norfolk cottage where her stepfather’s ghost was said to linger. It moves through a childhood in a Derbyshire mill village, a house where her mother’s lover and her father lived under one roof, a vision of something evil in the garden at seven, and the years of undiagnosed endometriosis that left her unable to have children. It was named MIND Book of the Year.
Beyond Black
Alison Hart, a professional medium, tours the commuter towns around London with her assistant Colette. Alison really can hear the dead, and behind her cheerful stage manner she is haunted by her childhood and by the ghosts of the men who were part of it. It was shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize.
Wolf Hall
Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son from Putney, rises from a beating in his father’s yard in 1500 to become Henry VIII’s most powerful servant: lawyer to Cardinal Wolsey, survivor of Wolsey’s fall, and the fixer of the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. It ends with the execution of Thomas More in 1535. It won the 2009 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is the best-selling Booker winner after Life of Pi.
Bring Up the Bodies
The second Cromwell novel covers about a year: Henry tires of Anne Boleyn, and Cromwell builds the case that ends with her execution, and that of her brother and four other men, so that the king can marry Jane Seymour. It won the 2012 Booker Prize, making Mantel the first woman to win twice, and the Costa Book of the Year.
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
A collection of contemporary stories, among them “Sorry to Disturb” and “Winter Break”. The title story, dated 6 August 1983, imagines a gunman lying in wait for the prime minister; it was the one story not published before, and the one that caused a row. A stage version opened at the Liverpool Everyman in 2026.
The Mirror & the Light
The final Cromwell novel, from Anne Boleyn’s execution in 1536 to Cromwell’s own on Tower Hill in 1540, after the failed marriage he arranged between Henry and Anne of Cleves. It sold more than 95,000 copies in its first three days in the UK. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, and won the 2021 Walter Scott Prize. The BBC adaptation aired in 2024.
In What Order to Read Hilary Mantel
The only real series is the Cromwell trilogy, and it must be read in order: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror & the Light. The second book is the shortest, and the third is the longest, at more than 800 pages. The other novels stand alone, except that Vacant Possession continues Every Day Is Mother’s Day.
If you have read the trilogy and want more history, go to A Place of Greater Safety, which shows the same interest in men who rise to power from nothing. If you want to see where her ghosts and unease come from, read Giving Up the Ghost and then Beyond Black.
A reading path
1. Wolf Hall (2009)
2. Bring Up the Bodies (2012)
3. The Mirror & the Light (2020)
4. Beyond Black (2005)
5. Giving Up the Ghost (2003)
6. A Place of Greater Safety (1992)
Everything Else Hilary Mantel Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 5 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Novels
2
2 books · 1986–1994
- 1986Vacant Possessionthe sequel to Every Day Is Mother’s Day
- 1994A Change of Climatea missionary couple’s years in southern Africa and their later life in Norfolk
Stories, essays and memoir
3
3 books · 2003–2023
- 2003Learning to Talkshort stories about childhood
- 2020Mantel Piecesessays and reviews, mostly from the London Review of Books
- 2023A Memoir of My Former Selfa posthumous selection of her writing about life and work
The years · 1952–2022
Quick facts about Hilary Mantel
- Known for
- The Thomas Cromwell trilogy, which turned a long-despised Tudor minister into a sympathetic hero and won her the Booker Prize twice
- 1952
- Born Hilary Thompson in Glossop, Derbyshire
- 1985
- First novel, Every Day Is Mother’s Day
- 2009
- Wolf Hall
- 2022
- Dies in Exeter, aged 70
- Born
- 6 July 1952, Glossop, Derbyshire; grew up in the mill village of Hadfield
- Died
- 22 September 2022, Exeter, Devon, after a stroke
- Education
- Law at the London School of Economics and the University of Sheffield (1973)
- Lived abroad
- About five years in Botswana from 1977, then four in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
- Married
- The geologist Gerald McEwen, in 1973; they divorced in 1981 and remarried in 1982
- Honours
- Booker Prize (2009, 2012); David Cohen Prize (2013); Dame (2014)
The red mark is 2009: Wolf Hall, the first Cromwell novel and her first Booker Prize.
Watch
Hilary Mantel on the Wolf Hall trilogy
Mantel talks to Waterstones about the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, from Wolf Hall to The Mirror & the Light.
How Hilary Mantel Writes: Inside Cromwell’s Head
Mantel told The Paris Review that she became a novelist only because she thought she had missed her chance to become a historian. Her aim, she said, was to make the fiction flexible enough to bend itself around the facts as we have them. Where the record is silent, as it mostly is about Cromwell’s youth and private life, she invents.
The Cromwell books are written in the present tense and from very close to Cromwell, who is mostly called simply “he”. The effect is that the reader knows what is coming, More’s execution, Anne’s, Cromwell’s own, and Cromwell does not. She called him “almost a case study in ambiguity”.
Her earlier novels are smaller and stranger: comedies with ghosts in them, set in suburbs, mill towns and expatriate compounds, full of people who cannot say what is happening to them. The same voice, dry, funny and alert to cruelty, runs through her essays and her memoir, where she writes about illness and her body as precisely as she writes about Henry VIII.
Frequently asked questions about Hilary Mantel’s books
How many books did Hilary Mantel write?
Twelve novels, two story collections, a memoir and a collection of essays during her lifetime, with more of her writing collected after her death. The twelve key books on this page run from Every Day Is Mother’s Day (1985) to The Mirror & the Light (2020).
What are Hilary Mantel’s books in order?
Every Day Is Mother’s Day (1985), Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), Fludd (1989), A Place of Greater Safety (1992), An Experiment in Love (1995), The Giant, O’Brien (1998), Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Beyond Black (2005), Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2014) and The Mirror & the Light (2020).
Where should I start with Hilary Mantel?
With Wolf Hall, then the rest of the trilogy in order. If you want something shorter first, Beyond Black or Fludd show her comic side.
What is Hilary Mantel’s most famous book?
Wolf Hall (2009), which won the Booker Prize and, by one estimate published by the Booker Prize after her death, had sold about 1.09 million copies, second among Booker winners only to Life of Pi.
In what order should I read the Wolf Hall trilogy?
Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), The Mirror & the Light (2020). Each picks up where the previous one stops, so read them in that order.
Did Hilary Mantel win the Booker Prize twice?
Yes, for Wolf Hall in 2009 and Bring Up the Bodies in 2012. She was the first woman and the first British writer to win it twice. The Mirror & the Light was longlisted in 2020 but did not make the shortlist.
Is Wolf Hall a TV series?
Yes. The BBC adapted Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies with Mark Rylance as Cromwell; the series reached American viewers on PBS in April 2015. A second series, based on The Mirror & the Light, aired in the UK in November 2024. The Royal Shakespeare Company also staged all three books.
Why was Hilary Mantel controversial?
Twice. In a 2013 lecture at the British Museum, published as “Royal Bodies” in the London Review of Books, she described how the Duchess of Cambridge was presented as a “shop window mannequin”; David Cameron and Ed Miliband criticised the remarks, while others defended the essay. In 2014 she said in an interview that she had imagined killing Margaret Thatcher in 1983, the idea behind her story “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher”, and some of Thatcher’s allies called for a police investigation.
When did Hilary Mantel die?
On 22 September 2022, in a hospital in Exeter, from complications of a stroke. She was seventy.
Footnotes
- Hilary Mantel — Wikipedia
- Wolf Hall — Wikipedia
- Bring Up the Bodies — Wikipedia
- The Mirror & the Light — Wikipedia
- Hilary Mantel, The Art of Fiction No. 226 — The Paris Review, 2015
- Giving Up the Ghost — Kirkus Reviews
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.”
— Hilary Mantel, “The Art of Fiction No. 226”, The Paris Review (2015)
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