The Award-Winning 2009 Best-Seller Named 'The Best Novel of the Century': 'Language as Fresh as New Paint'

If you're anything like the average reader, there's a decent chance you've walked into an ordinary bookstore and felt an almost overwhelming sense of dread.

With just how many books there are lining more shops' shelves, it's easy to find yourself struggling to pick the right book in a sea of endless possibilities, with only a handful of novels truly worthy of our time and attention.

Fortunately, however, many prestigious outlets have cited their personal recommendations for readers to gravitate towards, with The Guardian even piecing together a list of the best books of the 21st century to date.

At the very top of their list, the acclaimed outlet specifically cited the 2009 historical fiction novel Wolf Hall as the greatest literary work of the century yet, a label that very few books have ever been able to achieve.

Written by best-selling writer Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall forms the first part of Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, a fictionalized exploration of 16th century English minister Thomas Cromwell.

In Mantel's first book, the opportunistic Cromwell enters into the court of King Henry VIII, using the king's ongoing attempts to divorce the first of his six wives to become a key political influence in his rule.

"To read her story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell at the Tudor court, detailing the making of a new England and the self-creation of a new kind of man, is to step into the stream of her irresistibly authoritative present tense and find oneself looking out from behind her hero's eyes," The Guardian gushed about Mantel's novel.

"The surface details are sensuously, vividly immediate, the language as fresh as new paint; but her exploration of power, fate and fortune is also deeply considered and constantly in dialogue with our own era, as we are shaped and created by the past," the publication continued. "In this book we have, as she intended, 'a sense of history listening and talking to itself.'"

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This story was originally published April 20, 2026 at 1:56 PM.