The Mirror & the Light

Thomas Cromwell rises through Tudor England’s deadly court, told in close, modern-feeling prose.

Thomas Cromwell, now Master Secretary, engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn as Henry VIII turns toward Jane Seymour. The middle novel of Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy is court politics at close range—cool, lethal, and intimate.

The plague, a marriage, and the death of Shakespeare’s son—told with intimate, luminous focus.

Lucrezia de’ Medici is married at fifteen to the Duke of Ferrara, then isolated in a court where a duchess can be painted, praised, and quietly discarded. O’Farrell turns a famous rumor—that Lucrezia was murdered—into close, tense biographical historical fiction of Renaissance Italy.

An English pilot is shipwrecked into the deadly politics of feudal Japan.

A servant in Vermeer’s household becomes entangled in the making of a famous portrait.