Bring Up the Bodies author Hilary Mantel, Ladbrokes’s 6/4 favorite for this year’s award, has won her second Man Booker Prize in three years. This is the third time in eight years that the favorite has won the award (Wolf Hall was one of the others).
In our Most Anticipated Books post for the first half of 2012, Sonya Chung said of Bring Up the Bodies:
Those of us who gobbled up Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall eagerly await the release of its sequel, the ominously-titled Bring Up the Bodies. In Wolf Hall, we saw the operatic parallel rise of both Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn in the court of Henry VIII. In Bring Up the Bodies, Anne’s failure to produce a male heir, and Henry’s eternally wandering attentions, present Cromwell with the challenge of his career: protecting the King, eliminating Anne, and preserving his own power base. How we loved to hate Anne in Wolf Hall; will her destruction at the hands of the king and his chief minister win our sympathies? If anyone can effect such a complication of emotional investment, Mantel can.
Mantel was also recently profiled by Larissa MacFarquhar for The New Yorker, and you can read multiple excerpts from her latest work online thanks to the New York Review of Books, Parade, Macmillan, and The Telegraph. Also, you can check out reviews and excerpts from the five other titles on the Booker shortlist over here.
