Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light was one of the most anticipated novels of the year. And now it’s officially one of the best reviewed.
The book, the final installment of Mantel’s trilogy of historical novels about the English statesman Thomas Cromwell, was published on Tuesday, to the delight of fans who have been waiting years for the author’s follow-up to her critically acclaimed Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.
The novel is already a hit, the Guardian reports, selling nearly 100,000 copies in three days in the U.K.
It’s proved to be a hit with critics as well. A reviewer for Kirkus called the book “a triumph,” and the trilogy as a whole “brilliant.”
Other reviewers agreed. Parul Sehgal of the New York Times said the novel was a “triumphant capstone to Mantel’s trilogy,” and Genevieve Valentine of NPR wrote that the book “marks a triumphant end to a spellbinding story.”
At the Los Angeles Times, critic Mary Ann Gwinn wrote, “Is it as good as the first two books? Yes. Is it a masterpiece? Yes. Will you grow so attached to the antihero Cromwell (if you weren’t already) that you might just weep at the end? Entirely possible.”
The praise hasn’t been unanimous, however. At the New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn had mixed feelings, calling the 784-page novel “a bloated and only occasionally captivating work.”
And Peter Kemp, writing for the Sunday Times in the U.K., wasn’t impressed even a little bit by the book, saying it was “a painfully slow read, sometimes like wading through a Sargasso Sea of Tudor haberdashery, 16th-century foodstuffs, aristocratic genealogies and dynastic matrimonial entanglements.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
