Book Club Guide

The Mirror & the Light

by Hilary Mantel · 2020 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Power in its final form — the moment before the fall
The body politic: whose body is the king's body and what it costs
What Cromwell built — and why it could not save him

About this book

The final volume of Mantel's Cromwell trilogy follows Thomas Cromwell through the executions, marriages and political manoeuvres of the final years before his own fall. Mantel writes with the same extraordinary inhabited immediacy as Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, completing one of the greatest historical novel sequences in English. Winner of the Walter Scott Prize 2021.

Published in March 2020 — just as pandemic lockdowns began — The Mirror & the Light won the Walter Scott Prize in 2021. Mantel worked on it for years, aware it would complete her life's central project.

Discussion questions

The novel's outcome is known from the beginning — Cromwell will be executed. How does Mantel generate tension in a story we know the ending of — and is dramatic irony her primary tool?
Cromwell at the height of his power is a different man from the one we met in Wolf Hall. How has Mantel shown his transformation — and when exactly did he change?
The Mirror & the Light is much longer than its predecessors. What does the length carry — is it necessary, or does it sometimes feel like it is extending a world Mantel was reluctant to leave?
Cromwell's relationship to the king is love and servitude and political calculation simultaneously. By the end, which do you feel was primary?
The trilogy is one of the great historical novel sequences in English. What is its primary achievement — is it historical reconstruction, psychological portrait, or a meditation on power and its costs?