How is Hilary Mantel so good?

[theotherfossilsister]

Like how did she do it? Is it like the three card trick she references in Wolf Hall? Have a huge tbr pile but once again I am rereading her. How is she so immersive? I genuinely can’t work it out even in this reread. Love A Place if greater safety since I read it at university in 2009 and feel like no one can touch her

Yes, about four friends gave me copies of it when I was moving to the ME. It’s brilliant, but would make you want to bolt in the other direction… She does ‘mounting unease’ so well.

I’ve just Amazon Primed Wolf Hall. It should be right up my street, love history and a good book and have a membership to Hampton Court Palace 😂

I hope you adore every line, @BuffaloCauliflower — it is an astonishing novel, and I envy you not having read it.

I have read her Wolf Hall trilogy three times and have lived them more & more every time. I describe her prose as 'Clinically Lyrical' as though she writes with a silk-wrapped scalpel or a sharp quill dipped in honey.

She places you, most precisely, in the very centre of Cromwell's mind's eye. And in doing so makes distant history feel intimate and urgent. She makes you feel the dusty paper rubbing between Cromwell's impatient fingers. She makes you inhale the soft incense Cromwell smells on Wolsey's Cardinal robes. She makes you hear the spitting of the open fire in Cromwell's chamber.