The curtain here rises on Cromwell in 1536. He can render himself indispensable, and perhaps start suggesting to you what you should want. But his subtlety, his crooked genius, lies in never needing to be told he divines what you desire, before you know it yourself. “Tell me what you want, I’ll get it” is his mantra. Intimate knowledge, of the self and others, is among Cromwell’s most reliable weapons. They share an interest in what power reveals and conceals in human character. The more apt, and useful, comparison might be with Robert Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, the great anatomizer of political power. Mantel is often grouped with writers of historical fiction, like Penelope Fitzgerald.

He serves in the counting houses of Italy and the banks of Antwerp, rises to become the right hand of the doomed Cardinal Wolsey and later the king himself. He searches for the nearest war and enlists as a mercenary (“at least, as a soldier of King Louis, he was paid to receive blows”). He flees home, and from that moment on, he will distinguish himself with an ability to perceive a path for himself, to seize opportunity in the midst of chaos. It is the last time we will encounter him with his vision obscured. His eyes leak blood he is frightened that he has gone blind. Cromwell is a teenager and lying in his own vomit, enduring one of his father’s brutal beatings. “Wolf Hall,” the first book in the series, begins mid-scene, in a galloping present tense. Missing are the archaic dialogue and laborious scene-setting, the dense clutter of details signaling diligent research. It’s a story that could be the stuff of venerable and fusty historical fiction, but Mantel clears away the cobwebs. “The Mirror and the Light” is the triumphant capstone to Mantel’s trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rose to become the consigliere of Henry VIII and architect of the English Reformation.

The world is blotted out as you are enveloped in the sweep of a story rich with conquest, conspiracy and mazy human psychology. This gesture is called “mantling,” and it’s a fine description of reading Mantel’s work. When a hawk makes a kill, it drapes its wings over its prey, concealing it from other predators. Then there is Hilary Mantel, the author of several books, including an acclaimed suite of novels set in Tudor England, in whose own name can be discerned her themes - of cloaking and secrecy, the weight of responsibility - and, as it happens, the particular pleasure of submitting to her lavish and gory imagination. Ann Patchett, in whose work families desperately try to repair their tattered ties. Judy Blume, of stories of young girls coming of age.

Muriel Spark, of the scorching short fiction.

Book the mirror and the light