Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall (2009) is a Man Booker Prize-winning novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate. Set in the 1520s, it is about Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the Tudor court of King Henry VIII. Cromwell was chief minister to Henry VIII and oversaw the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, he was widely hated in his lifetime. Mantel's novel offers an intimate and more rounded portrait of this historical villain and the political machinations of Henry's court.