Hilary Mantel Books in Order

Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) is the only author to win the Booker Prize twice for a series - Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), the first two volumes of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy - and the trilogy's finale, The Mirror & the Light (2020), landed as the literary event of its year. But the shelf behind those three is one of the strangest and best in modern British fiction: a black-comic ghost story, a French Revolution epic, a Saudi-expat novel, a psychic-medium satire, a memoir of illness and false wombs. Her one true sequel outside the trilogy is Vacant Possession (1986), and almost nothing else needs order at all. This page sequences all of it (1985–2023).

Where to start

Wolf Hall (2009) - the trilogy and the peak; the past-tense prose takes twenty pages to click, then never lets go. Readers wanting the before-picture: Beyond Black (2005), her wild dark comedy.

Does the reading order matter?

The trilogy, strict: Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), The Mirror & the Light (March 2020) - one continuous story of Cromwell's rise and fall, told with the same closed pronoun trick throughout. Everything else stands alone. Two connective exceptions: Vacant Possession (1986) is the direct sequel to Every Day Is Mother's Day (1985), her debut - read them as a pair. The early shelf runs Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), Fludd (1989), A Place of Greater Safety (1992, the French Revolution epic and the longest pre-trilogy book), A Change of Climate (1994), An Experiment in Love (1995), The Giant, O'Brien (1998). Giving Up the Ghost (2003) is the memoir that explains the fiction; A Memoir of My Former Self (2023) is the posthumous essay collection. The BBC adaptation's second season covered The Mirror & the Light in 2024

Which one is the best?

Wolf Hall (2009), the Booker-winning peak; Bring Up the Bodies (2012), the tighter second; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), the epic for readers who want revolution over court.

Related guides

Readers finishing this shelf usually want the map next door: Ken Follett books in order, Diana Gabaldon books in order, Leo Tolstoy books in order. Every guide follows the same format — the shelf, the entry point, the honest answer about order.

Make it a project

Pick a session size and let the days accumulate — at the pace our reading speed test measures, most shelves above clear in a few weeks of half-hours. Every guide on the books in order shelf follows this same format, and when a book lands, its 8-question quiz is waiting on the original book quiz.