The Wolf Hall Picture Book

A photography book that is a vital accompaniment to the many fans of Hilary Mantel's bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy, now a major TV series.

At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Zola said, "In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something till you have photographed it." The act of photographing, at least for a moment, distinguishes its object and estranges it from its context . . . Every stroke of the pen releases a thousand pictures inside the writer's head. This book has made some of them visible.

Hilary Mantel, Ben Miles, the stage's celebrated Thomas Cromwell, and his brother, photographer George Miles, spent many years exploring the locations we know Thomas Cromwell visited and inhabited – Putney, Austin Friars, Wolf Hall, the Tower of London – to capture the faint traces of Tudor England and his extraordinary life. Accompanied with extracts from The Wolf Hall Trilogy, some of them published here for the first time, and including a stunning new essay by its author, these photographs reveal a world that is shadowy, frightening, sometimes whimsical – a portrait of a country in conversation with its past.

The present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released. Among other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history; of the gaps in the record; its elusive nature; and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives.