Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & The Light

Read out of turn on the day of release, and the highlight of my year so far. I took 2 days off work to read it, was waiting at Waterstones in Woking for the shutters to go up to get my hands on it, and then spent the next 48 hours in various restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, exercise bikes and comfy chairs reading the last part of this incredible trilogy. Cromwell's life-long balancing act came crashing down after 1 misstep (maybe 2 - failure to engineer a divorce from Anne of Cleves and to assassinate the pretender Reginald Pole).