The pageantry of Tudor history may rest in tableaux of kings and queens, but the drama ramps up backstage, where cousins, lovers and ladies-in-waiting jockey for power. In the second of her Booker-winning novels about Henry VIII’s influential adviser Thomas Cromwell, Hilary Mantel deepens her portrait of the master puppeteer as he orchestrates the downfall of the same woman whom, in the previous installment, Wolf Hall, he’d placed at Henry’s side. Mantel infuses Anne Boleyn’s progression from palace to executioner’s block with taut suspense; her exhilarating prose, unrivaled in contemporary fiction, renders Cromwell one of literature’s most compelling characters: the commoner-statesman, loyal and scheming, generous and cruel, whose public work consumes his private self.