Selected by William Landay

The author of the blockbuster Defending Jacob, William Landay says, “It is almost impossible, so late in the life of the genre, to write a legal novel that is truly fresh and unpredictable, to ‘make it new,’ as Ezra Pound commands us—believe me; I’ve tried.” But Landay found that elusive, fresh and unpredictable work in Mantel’s historical novel.

Landay says the 2012 Man Booker Prize-winning novel “manages to make it new by retelling a very old story: the dispatching of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, by Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. This Cromwell accomplishes with a trumped-up charge of adultery, using the travesty of a legal system in a police state. The investigation is swift and ruthless: a series of interrogations in which confessions are extorted in various ways, a show trial, an unforgettable execution. To a lawyer, it is macabre to read. To a novelist like me, it is all utterly masterful.”