Beautifully written, fiercely intelligent, epic in scope, intimate in range, this is a note-perfect study in character and period, a compelling tale of the son of a brutal blacksmith who rises to the highest office in the land and sets about breaking down the old entrenched power structures and remaking a society in a more egalitarian fashion. That one of Thomas Cromwell's chief adversaries should be Thomas More, author of Utopia, is entirely apposite, and it is not unexpected that more romantic hindsight should cast him as a villain.

The tawdry soap opera of Henry VIII's second marriage becomes a painful, sometimes blackly comic, sometimes wrenching, always divisive political drama where lives are ruined and power shifts dramatically. But it is Cromwell's lively extended family and his affection for his boisterous household that keeps the story, and the character, grounded. 

This won the Booker, and I'm slightly relieved after my previous Booker winner this year, The Sea The Sea, which certainly had its charms, but whose qualities as a year's best literary work escaped me, unless it was a particularly off year. Wolf Hall is superlative, a supreme achievement and a worthy winner.