Recommendations
Books Like Wolf Hall Trilogy
What to read after Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy — Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and The Mirror & the Light (2020) — is the greatest English historical novel sequence of the twenty-first century. If you finished the trilogy and want more of the same quality of intelligence, prose, and historical imagining, these are the novels that meet that standard.
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Bring Up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel
Book 2 of the Wolf Hall Trilogy — the fall of Anne Boleyn, tighter and more concentrated than Wolf Hall, and widely considered the better Booker Prize winner of the two; if you have not yet read it, it is the most urgent next step after Wolf Hall
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The Mirror & the Light
by Hilary Mantel
Book 3 of the trilogy — Cromwell's last four years and his execution; the longest of the three, the most intimate portrait of his interior life, and the culmination of everything Mantel built across the previous two volumes; Mantel spent ten years writing it
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A Place of Greater Safety
by Hilary Mantel
Mantel's novel of the French Revolution — Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins from the provincial obscurity of their origins to the Terror; published in 1992, it is the first masterwork that showed what she could do with historical material and large casts; different in tone from Wolf Hall but the same fundamental ambition
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Hamnet
by Maggie O'Farrell
Agnes, the wife of a glover's son in Stratford-upon-Avon who will eventually be known as William Shakespeare, and the death of their son Hamnet in 1596 — set in the same Elizabethan world as Wolf Hall's later chapters, written with the same quality of attention to material and domestic life, and among the best historical novels published in the same decade
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The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett
The building of a cathedral in twelfth-century England — Follett's most ambitious novel; set four centuries before Wolf Hall, but the same interest in power, architecture, and the way large events grind individual lives; very long, very absorbing, and the most widely read medieval English novel
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A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
Count Rostov under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel from 1922 to 1954 — the closest contemporary equivalent to Wolf Hall in its concern with how a man of character survives a hostile political system through intelligence, grace, and the refusal to be diminished by his circumstances
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The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
A Franciscan friar investigating a series of murders in a medieval Italian monastery in 1327 — one of the most intellectually demanding historical novels of the twentieth century; set two centuries before Wolf Hall but occupying the same preoccupation with power, text, and the violence of religious institutions
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Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
Abraham Lincoln grieving his dead son Willie in a Washington cemetery populated by the unquiet dead — a formally experimental historical novel that bears comparison to Wolf Hall in its willingness to invent radically within the documented historical record while remaining faithful to the emotional truth
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