Book Club Guide

Bring Up the Bodies

by Hilary Mantel · 2012 · Historical Fiction

Key themes

The destruction of Anne Boleyn — and who benefits
Power as calculation rather than passion
History told from the service entrance

About this book

Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn; tense, brilliant and even sharper than its predecessor.

Published in 2012, Bring Up the Bodies won the Booker Prize, making Mantel the first author to win the prize twice with books from the same sequence. The Cromwell trilogy was completed with The Mirror & the Light in 2020.

Discussion questions

The novel follows Wolf Hall's method of present-tense 'he' narration. Does it feel different here — does Cromwell seem more or less sympathetic when he is engineering the deaths of men who may be innocent?
Anne Boleyn is the novel's victim, but Mantel is careful to show her as she really was — intelligent, politically engaged, sometimes cruel. How does this complexity affect the reader's response to her destruction?
The charges against Anne's alleged lovers are almost certainly fabricated. How does Mantel show Cromwell constructing a case he knows is false — and what does this say about how power works?
Bring Up the Bodies is shorter and more tightly focused than Wolf Hall. How does the compression serve the subject — and is the sense of inevitability that it creates appropriate for a story whose end is already known?
The novel won the Booker Prize like its predecessor — the first sequel to do so. What does it do that extends and deepens the first novel rather than simply continuing it?