Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
So before we get into this, the facts: this is a barnstormer of a book and I enjoyed every inch of it. I came to it after reading Wolf Hall, which I had found a little difficult, and, as a consequence, felt as if I needed to build myself up before doing Bring Up The Bodies. Well, I did not need to build myself up for this is a barnstormer and I devoured it because IT ALL GOES DOWN and it’s all inevitable and horrible in the middle of it is Thomas Cromwell, this darkly complex and actually pretty horrific guy orchestrating it all and paying people back for slights done years past and I finished bits of it and went to the person nearest at me “honestly, this has just happened and you will never believe it and isn’t it all horrible?” I finished the book in the park and I yelled at small children nearby “if Henry VIII cracks onto you, run far, far away” (I did not but I was very close to doing so). In fact, I just sort of sat there and stared into the distance and through the trees and thought of Anne Boleyn and the tightening of the web about her and how brilliant this book is.
Wait, I think that’s the facts right there. This is such a well-told and classy thing and it kind of just made me want to tell everybody about it the moment that I finished. Mantel’s writing is so well done that it’s incredibly beautiful to witness in practice. I love, for example, how every untagged ‘he’ is just automatically known to be Cromwell because he is the centre of this world, that suddenly he will itemise and break down the world about him because that’s the way that he sees it, that all of a sudden a point will be paid of three hundred pages later and you will not see it coming until it blindsides you. An education, this, on a thousand levels.
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Daisy May Johnson 
I found myself almost holding my breath in the last few chapters; it’s brilliant. And Mantel’s command of POV is so amazing. I think it was in the last book, I noticed how often she went into a lot of detail about embroidery on what women were wearing, and I was like “??” and then I remembered that Cromwell had apprenticed to a textile merchant or some such.
YES. You have these moments of going “huh, why is that?” and then you’re all “Well, there we are.” It’s just all so beautiful and smart and brilliant.