#4 – Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel – 2025 Best Reads

Hilary Mantel’s writing-style is so immersive and dream-like that describing the journey you’ve been on while reading her is as tricky as sharing a dream. You can’t help but diminish the feel of it by reducing it to plot. But the effect is so encompassing that Bring Up the Bodies easily made the list of Best Reads this year.

I began my Mantel-a-thon last year and Wolf Hall, the first of her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, made the 2024 Best Reads Top Ten. Bring Up the Bodies, the second in the series, continues the tale of Henry VIII’s chief fixer who shaped the course of the English Reformation by deftly wielding the instruments of Tudor power. This volume covers the tawdry period in 1536 when Anne Boleyn lost the king’s favor and her head in quick succession.

Cromwell has his own axes to grind as he seeks to secure his position and to mete out justice to the elite families that have never respected or supported the blacksmith’s son who learned the craft of court politics while in service to the late Cardinal Wolsey. But Cromwell isn’t especially bloodthirsty, though there’s plenty of blood to go around. He is a man who mastered the stress point in the system and helped engineer a new era for Britain.

Mantel continues to mine the psychological and supernatural in her writing here. Published in 2012, Bring Up the Bodies finds the author, like her subject, at the top of her game.

The last line of the book says: “There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.”

And, indeed, 2020’s The Mirror & The Light begins and will bring the trilogy home.

Previously in this series:

#5 – We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston

#6 – Erasure by Percival Everett

#7 – Middlemarch by George Eliot

#8 – Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

#9 – By the Word Worked by Fleming Rutledge

#10 – Longitude by Dava Sobel