I have seen this book on numerous occasions when I have been in the library, but I have always passed on by and left it sitting on the shelf. I was partly put off by the sheer size of it, but I also had a sneaking feeling that I would find it a little too high-brow for me and would struggle to get to the end. Maybe it was because I have recently had a run of historical novels, or maybe all the focus on King Charles' coronation has put me in the right frame of mind, but three weeks ago I finally found the courage to take it home. It wasn't as difficult to read as I thought it might be, and I was very much helped by the list of characters thoughtfully provided at the start of the book. There are a lot of people to get to grips with but Mantel is careful to jog the readers memory if someone suddenly crops up again after a gap of several hundred pages. The book runs to exactly 650 sides of small print, so it is a bit of a project, but the research is so ...