I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times book review, and this is the book review podcast.

Last summer, when we released our list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far.

One of the authors with multiple titles on that list was Hillary Mantell, who died in 2022.

Those novels were Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the first two in a trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell,

the all-purpose fixer and advisor to King Henry the 8th.

Those books were also adapted into a British television series starring Mark Rylance as

Cromwell and Damien Lewis as King Henry. That television series aired here in the United States

in 2015. It's now a decade later, and the third book in Mantell series,

The Mirror and the Light, has also been adapted for the small screen. You can watch that now on PBS.

I'm joined this week by Nicholas Pearson, currently publishing director at the British Publishing

House John Murray. He previously director at the British Publishing House John Murray,

he previously worked at the publisher Fourth Estate for more than two decades.

It was there that he had the great opportunity to work with Hillary Mantell on, among other things,

the Wolf Hall Trilogy of Books, the first two of which won the Booker Prize,

one of the preeminent prizes

in all of English language literature. Nicholas, thank you for joining the Book Review podcast.

Pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Now, before I ask you, of course, a million questions about Hillary Mantell, I'd love if you

could just tell me, tell us a little bit about

yourself. You've worked in British publishing for a good while. You've worked with some amazing

authors during that time. Well, I've been working as an editor all my life since 1988, and I spent a very

long time, much of that time, at Fourth Estate, where I teamed up with Hillary. I was 26 years

...