Were you one of the many who loved the Man Booker prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall? The sequel—another Man-Booker winner—and the second in a planned trilogy, Bring up the Bodies (Holt, $28), is just as good, possibly better. Hilary Mantel dramatizes the last few months in the life of Anne Boleyn, largely from the point of view of the increasingly ruthless Thomas Cromwell, the man most responsible for bringing her down. The taut story line moves remorselessly toward the queen’s inevitable doom, contrasting dramatically with Mantel’s lyrical, liquid prose. Most astonishing is this writer’s uncanny ability to place us exactly where she wants us with a brief, descriptive turn of phrase. We see the faint outline of the future—an unbelieving queen, the compliant, complacent Jane Seymour waiting in the wings, Cromwell himself, mature and self-confident, almost at peace with himself, but becoming perhaps too necessary to his jealous and unpredictable monarch.