Decent, Respectable & Empty

Rarely has a sequel excited such eager anticipation as Hilary Mantel’s follow-up to her bestselling and Booker Prize–winning Wolf Hall, her novel of the court of Henry VIII and England’s break with Rome. Bring Up the Bodies (which also recently won the Booker Prize) continues to chart the rise of Thomas Cromwell, one of the chief architects of the English Reformation and keeper of his monarch’s—and his own—best interests, a sharp-eyed fixer in the “...

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