Due to COVID-19 health and safety concerns, this event will be postponed. Information about the rescheduled event will be announced at a later date. All ticket buyers will receive a full refund in the next 5-10 business days.

This program does not include a book signing.

In 1536 in England, Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen before she dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves.

Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him or a private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad, and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to the breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves?

With The Mirror & the Light, Mantel—a two-time winner of the Booker Prize—brings to a close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision, and of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion, and courage. In conversation with Barrie Hardymon, the senior editor at NPR’s Weekend Edition and the lead editor for books.