Thomas Cromwell has seen off Robert Langdon after Hilary Mantel's Booker prize win on Tuesday night sent her novel Wolf Hall soaring ahead of Dan Brown in Amazon's bestseller charts.
Mantel's Wolf Hall, an historical novel about the life of Cromwell, the machiavellian schemer from the court of Henry VIII who oversaw the dissolution of the monasteries, was last night named winner of the £50,000 Man Booker prize. The win helped increase its Amazon sales by 1,500%, sending it leaping to the top of the online bookseller's charts and pushing Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, starring Harvard symbologist Langdon, into second place. Mantel's French Revolution-set novel A Place of Greater Safety also enjoyed a knock-on effect, with sales up almost 2,000%.
Mantel was voted winner of the Booker by three votes to two, beating former winners JM Coetzee and AS Byatt. "It was a majority decision but it was not unanimous," said judge John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, this morning. Mullan praised the "quality of her prose", which he said gets forgotten when the scope of the novel – a "Tudor soap opera", as Mantel has described it – is discussed. "Reading it for the third time, line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it's just a real delight. Fantastically well written," he said. "Her inventiveness, the glitter of the prose, is really remarkable."
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