Book Club Guide

Wolf Hall

by Hilary Mantel · 2009 · Historical Fiction

Key themes

Power and how it is accumulated — slowly, practically, ruthlessly
Thomas Cromwell as a new kind of man in an old world
The king's desire and the machinery it requires

About this book

Thomas Cromwell's rise in the court of Henry VIII; political intrigue rendered in extraordinary close-up prose.

Published in 2009, Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize and was the first book by a woman to win both the Booker and the Costa Prize. Mantel described writing it as discovering that she had lived these events before.

Discussion questions

Cromwell is narrated in an unusual second-person-like 'he' that makes the reader inhabit his perspective entirely. What does this grammatical choice achieve — and what does it say about power and point of view?
Mantel presents Henry VIII as comprehensible rather than monstrous — a man with desires and fears, not a tyrant from a textbook. How does this humanism serve or complicate the novel's argument?
The novel covers the years of Anne Boleyn's rise without sentimentalising her. What does Mantel achieve by keeping Anne's perspective at a slight remove?
Cromwell rose from a blacksmith's son to the king's most powerful minister. What does Wolf Hall say about the relationship between talent, ruthlessness and class in Tudor England?
Mantel spent years researching the period but the novel is intensely novelistic, not documentary. What does fiction give her that historical narrative cannot?