Start with Wolf Hall, and know in advance about the pronoun. Mantel writes Thomas Cromwell in a very close third person and habitually uses "he" to mean Cromwell even when another man was the last person named. Readers spend the first fifty pages confused, decide the book is badly edited, and give up. It is not badly edited; it is a deliberate device that puts you inside one man's head so completely that he barely needs naming. Once you accept the rule — when in doubt, "he" is Cromwell — the novel opens up and becomes one of the best English novels of this century.
If a 650-page Tudor novel is simply not what you want, start with Fludd instead. It is under two hundred pages, it is very funny, and it is a small strange fable about a curate arriving in a 1950s Pennine village. It will tell you whether you like the sentences.
The Cromwell trilogy
Read Wolf Hall, then Bring Up the Bodies, then The Mirror and the Light, in that order and no other. This is a continuous narrative and the books do not stand alone.
Bring Up the Bodies is the best of the three and the easiest: half the length, tightly focused on the destruction of Anne Boleyn, and by then you already know the voice. It is the book that converts people who merely admired the first.
The Mirror and the Light is 875 pages and it is slow by design — a long elegiac account of a man who has run out of enemies and therefore out of uses. A significant number of readers stall in its middle third, and that is a fair reaction rather than a failure. If you do stall, stop and come back; the last hundred pages are extraordinary and worth the delay.
The other historical novel
A Place of Greater Safety was written before the Cromwell books but published later, and it does for the French Revolution what Wolf Hall does for the Tudor court: Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre followed from childhood to the guillotine.
Be warned that it is harder than the trilogy. It is around 750 pages, the cast is enormous, the French naming conventions are not smoothed out for you, and Mantel gives you far less orientation than she later learned to. Read it after the trilogy, when you trust her, and keep a list of names.
The contemporary novels
Beyond Black is her strangest and, for some readers, her best: a professional psychic touring the dismal towns of the English commuter belt, haunted by genuinely malevolent spirits from her own past. It is very dark and very funny, and it is nothing like the Tudor books.
Eight months on Ghazzah Street is a short, claustrophobic novel about an English woman in an expatriate compound in Jeddah, and it works as a thriller about not being told things. Fludd is the lightest thing she wrote and the best palate cleanser.
The memoir
Giving Up the Ghost is a short autobiographical book about childhood, illness and the misdiagnosis that shaped her adult life. Read it last, or read it first if you prefer to meet writers before their work; it is the most direct thing on this list and it explains a great deal about the fiction's preoccupation with bodies and with being disbelieved.
Where to stop
Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are a complete experience, and stopping there is an entirely honest choice — the second book ends at a natural close. Add The Mirror and the Light when you have the appetite for something long and sad. Add Beyond Black if you want to see how much range she actually had.
More author reading orders are on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Hilary Mantel Reading Order: Where to Start.
