Hilary Mantel Books in Order

A Memoir of My Former Self collects more than forty years of Mantel's nonfiction, from personal essays and lectures to sharp book and film reviews. She writes about childhood, illness, nationalism, the Tudors and other writers, tracing how her interests fed into the novels.

Set after Anne Boleyn's execution, The Mirror and the Light traces Cromwell through the final years of his dominance at Henry VIII's court. As he arranges new alliances and marriages, old enemies close in, turning his hard won power into a death sentence.

Mantel Pieces gathers essays, reviews and diary pieces written over decades for a literary journal. Subjects range from Robespierre and Tudor courtiers to true crime, religion, royal bodies and life in Saudi Arabia, offering a sharp, funny companion to her novels.

The School of English is a long story about an immigrant domestic worker hired to help in a grand Notting Hill house. As she learns the rules of the household, its panic room and its brittle teenage son, fear, class tension and cruelty tighten around her.

This story collection ranges from awkward encounters in Jeddah and bin liners in suburban hallways to a chilling tale of an IRA sniper hiding in a Windsor flat. Throughout, Mantel uses domestic detail and dark humour to expose violence, class resentment and uneasy politics.

In How Shall I Know You?, a tired, unwell writer travels to a small town to give a talk for a cash strapped literary society. Promised cosy hospitality, she instead finds a shabby hotel, a feral young porter and a long, wet night that slides from awkwardness toward menace.

Bring Up the Bodies opens with Henry VIII growing tired of Anne Boleyn and drifting toward Jane Seymour. Thomas Cromwell is tasked with ending the royal marriage, and as he gathers rumours and testimony, he engineers a trial whose outcome he cannot fully control.

Wolf Hall follows Thomas Cromwell's rise from brutalised blacksmith's son to chief fixer in Henry VIII's court, as the king seeks to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Everyday negotiations, jokes and threats quietly decide the fate of England.

Beyond Black follows Alison Hart, an overweight professional medium who tours English suburbs, and her efficient but sceptical assistant Colette. Alison's cheery stage persona masks a brutal childhood and a vicious spirit guide who will not leave her alone, making everyday life more frightening than any séance.

Learning to Talk is a collection of linked stories in which an adult narrator looks back on a difficult northern childhood. Each piece catches a moment when language, class or schooling shows her a way out, while also revealing what can never quite be left behind.

Giving Up the Ghost is Mantel's unsparing memoir of growing up Catholic in Derbyshire, living with a volatile stepfather and later battling undiagnosed pain that turned out to be severe endometriosis. She writes about childlessness, houses she has loved and the ghosts that live in memory.

The Giant, O'Brien contrasts an Irish storyteller who earns a living displaying his extraordinary height with John Hunter, a celebrated London surgeon hungry for new specimens. As O'Brien's troupe struggles to survive the city, Hunter quietly plots to claim the giant's body for science.

An Experiment in Love follows Carmel McBain from a strict northern Catholic childhood to a women's hall of residence in 1970s London. As she studies on an empty stomach, her uneasy ties with school friends Karina and Julia expose sharp lines of class, ambition and betrayal.

In A Change of Climate, charitable couple Ralph and Anna Eldred run a chaotic open house in rural Norfolk, but their past will not stay buried. Flashbacks to years as missionaries in southern Africa, and an unspoken horror there, slowly explain why their family is starting to fall apart.

A Place of Greater Safety reimagines the French Revolution through the intertwined lives of Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre. From provincial childhoods to the Jacobin Club and the Terror, friendships, love affairs and private debts drive public events toward the guillotine.

Fludd takes place in a bleak northern village in 1956, where a doubting priest and an unhappy young nun are visited by a mysterious curate who may not be human at all. His presence unsettles a rigid Catholic parish and sparks small miracles, rebellions and escapes.

When cartographer Frances Shore moves to Jeddah to join her engineer husband, she expects boredom, not danger. Trapped in a claustrophobic apartment block, she makes uneasy friends, hears weeping from a supposedly empty flat and slowly realises that something violent is being hidden above her head.

Set about ten years after Every Day is Mother's Day, Vacant Possession follows Muriel Axon after her release from a psychiatric institution. Using disguise and mimicry, she quietly infiltrates the lives of the people who betrayed her, turning suburban respectability into something far more menacing.

Every Day is Mother's Day is a blackly comic portrait of Evelyn Axon, a self styled medium, and Muriel, the adult daughter she keeps shut inside a decaying house. As social worker Isabel Field tries to intervene, secrets, lost case files and a hidden pregnancy push everyone toward disaster.

In this continuation of Augustine's story, he moves between Prohibition era America, a tense, changing Germany and a Britain on the edge of class conflict. Private entanglements play out against the ruthless consolidation of Nazi power and the Night of the Long Knives.

A young Welsh aristocrat, Augustine, flees home after being suspected in a child's death and hides with relatives in Germany. There he falls in love and drifts into the turmoil of the early Nazi movement, witnessing the failed Munich putsch at close quarters.