Bring Up the Bodies

Janet Maslin Two years ago something astonishingly fair happened in the world of prestigious prizes: the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for 2009 both went to the right winner…Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall…It was a hard act to follow. But the follow-up is equally sublime.…Bring Up the Bodies is beautifully constructed…it proves delightful to watch and anticipate how Ms. Mantel steers [all the characters] into and out of Cromwell's view, follows his canny assessments of how to play them off against one another and lays out the affronts for which they will later pay dearly…The wonder of Ms. Mantel's retelling is that she makes these events fresh and terrifying all over again. —The New York Times