Well! This wasn’t the most spirit lifting book to read in a global pandemic...but maybe it was fitting...threaded through as it was with the sense of time moving on, things of colossal importance in the here and now, becoming history, only to be remembered ....or forgotten.
The whole book was about mirrors..about what we see reflected back to us....and avoiding looking to carefully for fear of what we see. Cromwell and Henry look back and their dreams of the past make for discomfort...but I don’t think either really could look the past or themselves in the eye.
The book is also incredibly blood thirsty...the ways people kill others....you couldn’t make it up! The end ...well it is no secret what happens but the thing that saved me from uncontrolled misery and sadness was that ...he could have walked away....so many times. Power and money prevented him, maybe also a certain loss of what to do with himself maybe.

But the words...oh my goodness..there are sections...not infrequent...when you just have to stop and read, reread and bathe in the wonderful words..


Hilary Mantel is extraordinary and incredible...has there ever been such a writer? I don’t think so.

I only gave four stars because there were a few times when I felt there were sections that went on a wee bit too long.,,and one or two bits that I felt didn’t need to be included to understand the times, the people or the plot...plots...and because of the times I was reading this sometimes made me trepidatious about the doom.