This book is a pure delight. If you love history -Tudor history - it is a very clever re-creation of the time told in the third person but through the mind of Thomas Cromwell a most human hero. It seems to be be very accurate and raises historical fiction to a new and exhilaring level

Gave up half way in. A time piece that jumps around. Overall, quite boring.

This book has atmosphere! I had goosebumps a lot of the time while reading it. You get a marvellous sense of impending doom. The character of Thomas More was very unlike the story I was told at school and I loved the way Hans Holbein popped up from time to time. All in all a good argument against hereditary monarchy abd the involvment of religion in state affairs.

Wolf Hall is big and confusing. There are 5 pages of names that you have to get your head around and some of them have two names or nicknames. Hilary Mantel also keeps starting sentences with "He" and as she's already talking about somebody else, this can cause difficulties. Having said that, the language is elegant and readable and the characters are substantial. Coming at that well-known period in history through Cromwell gives a new perspective and she makes us like him. He becomes a rounded character with both flaws and good qualities. She makes Anne Boleyn look like a hard scheming harpy, being used as a political pawn by her ambitious family.
The discussion of the way society changed during the period is dealt with brilliantly and we get a good feel for the way people lived their lives.
By the end of the book I was engrossed in the story and was disappointed that she hadn't gone on until the end of Cromwell's life. (Not that I wanted to get there as it all ends in tears.) The next book, I think.

Really enjoyed it heres a reveiw :
A stunning book. It breaks free of what the novel has become nowadays. I can't think of anything since Middlemarch which so convincingly builds a world." Diana Athill "A fascinating read, so good I rationed myself. It is remarkable and very learned; the texture is marvellously rich, the feel of Tudor London and the growing household of a man on the rise marvellously authentic. Characters real and imagined spring to life, from the childish and petulant King to Thomas Wolsey's jester, and it captures the extrovert, confident, violent mood of the age wonderfully." C.J. Sansom "A magnificent achievement: the scale of its vision and the fine stitching of its detail; the teeming canvas of characters; the style with its clipped but powerful immediacy; the wit, the poetry and the nuance." Sarah Dunant "A superb novel, beautifully constructed, and an absolutely compelling read. Mantel has created a novel of Tudor times which persuades us that we are there, at that moment, hungry to know what happens next. It is the making of our English world, and who can fail to be stirred by it?" Helen Dunmore