Books of the Noughties: Wolf Hall

Last week 4th Estate editor Mark wrote about the first of his ‘Books of the Noughties’ - Miracles of Life by JG Ballard. This week he talks about 4th Estate’s most recent success, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

Publishers, for obvious reasons, always say their books are astonishingly good, but, just sometimes, they genuinely are. I read Wolf Hall in manuscript in the autumn of 2008, and knew this was one. I hadn’t really known what to expect when I started it, but it was clear within a few pages that this was something not just out of the ordinary but unlike anything else being written today.

So much has now been written about it that it seems pointless to add to it here, but suffice it to say that even the longest and most intelligent review can’t get close to the richness, subtlety and depth of the experience of reading the book itself. But for a short account you can’t do better than John Burnside’s recommendation in the New Statesman’s Books of the Year, who wrote that “to describe Wolf Hall as a historical novel is like calling Moby-Dick a book on fishing and, this year, the Booker judges did get it absolutely right. Mantel is an astonishing writer: a prose stylist who combines absolute precision with a compelling sense of flow, and a marvellously subtle observer of character. Wolf Hall casts a spell that makes us think long and hard about order, law and the workings of power.”

Gratifyingly, the book has done superbly well; coming up to 220,000 copies in hardback in the UK alone. It is easy to say with hindsight that Wolf Hall was always going to be a success, and perhaps it always was; I would have been profoundly surprised, as well as profoundly depressed, if its brilliance wasn’t recognised. But it was, and we are all at Fourth Estate savouring that all-too-rare moment that is, when it comes down to it, why we’re in publishing: when a book that we first read as a word document, and loved, is out there, being read by tens and hundreds of thousands of people.

Read more about Wolf Hall:

• Read an interview with Hilary Mantel
• Hilary Mantel: The Novelist’s Arithmetic
• Watch Hilary Mantel at the Daunt Debates

Keep checking back for more exciting news on Wolf Hall soon.