Hilary Mantel: Her grasp on character and circumstance was equal to Shakespeare

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. I can’t think of many authors who have delivered sentence after sentence of complex pleasure while simultaneously producing chapter after chapter of heart-racing action the way she did in the Wolf Hall trilogy. Yet at the same time, Mantel had the great novelist’s knack of making dusty, distant events snap exhilaratingly to life. And she wrote several stylistically various novels before Wolf Hall, from Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which drew with characteristic perspicacity on her expat experiences in Saudi Arabia, to 2005’s excellent Orange Prize-nominated Beyond Black, which, in its portrait of an alarmingly damaged psychic, explored her keen interest in the link between psychological experience and the supernatural.