The trilogy which featured "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up The Bodies" reaches its hotly-anticipated conclusion. Anne Boleyn is dead, Henry VIII settles into a short-lived third marriage, and Thomas Cromwell envisages a new country in the mirror of the future. Royal will is set to clash with a common man's force of imagination. Each of the previous instalments was awarded the Man Booker prize.

Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her latest novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize.