Bring up the Bodies (Mantel) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Bring Up the Bodies takes up exactly where Wolf Hall leaves off: its great magic is in making the worn-out story of Henry and his many wives seem fascinating and suspenseful again.... Bring Up the Bodies (the title refers to the four men executed for supposedly sleeping with Anne) isn’t nostalgic, exactly, but it’s astringent and purifying, stripping away the cobwebs and varnish of history...so that the English past comes to seem like something vivid, strange and brand new.
Charles McGrath - New York Times Book Review


[D]arkly magnificent…The pleasures of Bring Up the Bodies—and they are abundant, albeit severe—reside in Mantel's artistic mastery. She animates history with a political and psychological acuity equal to Tolstoy's in War and Peace (and she might have the edge on Count Leo in politics). Sardonic humor, particularly in scenes with not-nearly-as-dumb-as-she-seems Jane Seymour, leavens the ominous mood. Gruffly compassionate toward villains and victims alike, Mantel reveals their weaknesses and cruelties bundled up in a flawed humanity we share.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post