This is another of those occasions where I read a book in January and predict with great confidence that it will be on my Top Ten list at the end of the year. A lot of unexpected things may happen to me in 2010, but the chances that I’d read 10 books better than Wolf Hall? Never gonna happen, my friend.
You all know I love historical fiction. If I had to name the best historical novels I’ve ever read in my life, I’d list Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour, Margaret George’s The Autobiography of Henry VIII … and now, Wolf Hall.
Wolf Hall has achieved something that rarely happens to big, blockbuster historical novels: it won the Man Booker prize. It’s a novel that has managed to transcend the conventions of the historical fiction genre and the lack of respect that genre often gets in literary circles, to win arguably the most significant prize in English literature. Now, just because a book won the Booker doesn’t guarantee I’m going to love it. One year I tried to read every book on the Booker longlist and didn’t exactly emerge with a new list of favourites. But Wolf Hall combines all the best of historical and literary fiction — it’s a huge, sprawling, completely engrossing novel where brilliant, finely tuned language is used to build characterization in a way few other novels I’ve ever read can equal.






