British author Hilary Mantel is ready to complete her million-selling trilogy of Thomas Cromwell novels. The last instalment is all set to hit the stands, after a long wait of eight years. Henry Holt and Company announced on 22 May that The Mirror & the Light comes out in the US on 10 March, 2020, five days after HarperCollins Publishers releases it in the UK. The first two Cromwell novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, each won the Man Booker Prize.
Nicholas Pearson, Mantel’s publisher at Fourth Estate told The Guardian that the latest book is “completely immersive, as it charts the final years of Cromwell, it also casts a fresh light on the politics of power and the way we live now.” He further adds, “When I first read the opening pages of Wolf Hall, I was drawn into history in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Hilary Mantel allows us to inhabit the past as it happens – we watch Cromwell and those in his orbit as their lives unfold, making decisions the consequences of which they cannot know.” Mantel said in a statement that the novels have been a “long journey” through Cromwell’s rise in the court of King Henry VIII and the “last miles” to the “scaffold at Tower Hill,” where he was beheaded in 1540. Wolf Hall was published in 2009, and Bring Up the Bodies in 2012. Worldwide sales for the two books top 5 million copies. (With inputs from The Associated Press)