Hilary Mantel is finishing her Man Booker Prize-winning Thomas Cromwell series in 2020
The Mirror & the Light, the final novel of Hilary Mantel's popular Thomas Cromwell trilogy will be available on March 4, 2020.
The last instalment of the trilogy traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell in 16th-century Tudor England, the true story of a boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power and becomes chief deputy to King Henry VIII.
Mantel is the author of 14 books and is one of the few writers who has won England's Man Booker Prize twice. She won the awards for the first two books in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy — first in 2009 for Wolf Hall, and again in 2012 for its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.
The Mirror & the Light concludes the trilogy with his fall from grace and execution.
Wolf Hall went on to sell more copies than any other Booker winner ever — nearly 3.5 million worldwide — and also won the American National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel was on shortlist for the special Golden Man Booker Prize, an honour in celebration of the award's 50th anniversary in 2018.
Mantel told CBC Radio's Writers & Company host Eleanor Wachtel in 2012 that a feeling that the real life story of Thomas Cromwell hadn't been told fuelled her desire to write the trilogy: "I think historical fiction is in many ways a project of recovery, rediscovery and, sometimes, rehabilitation...He was very central to King Henry VIII's reign — he was his chief minister for almost 10 years during the tumultuous decade of the 1530s. He's a fascinating man in his own right."