Wolf Hall
Thomas Cromwell's ascent through the court of Henry VIII, told entirely from inside Cromwell's calculating, sympathetic, dangerous mind. Mantel's 2009 novel reinvented the historical novel by refusing to make the past feel quaint. The present-tense prose and the ambiguous "he" (which keeps slipping between characters) put you inside Tudor politics with no safety net. Won the Booker.
Mantel's floating 'he' will throw you a dozen times per chapter; she conceded the point by clarifying it in the sequel. Add a cast list five pages long, half a dozen Thomases, and 650 pages of committee meetings rendered as drama. And her More, a cold domestic tyrant, is as much a thumb on the scale as the saint she was correcting.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
