A Place of Greater Safety

“The Heart of the Storm” is Hilary Mantel’s first historical novel, by the celebrated author of the famous trilogy about Thomas Cromwell (“Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up the Accused,” “The Mirror and the Light”), whose two books received the Booker Prize.

A novel that was significantly ahead of its time and only saw the light decades after it was written. For the first time in the history of English literature, the French Revolution is shown on a large scale not through the eyes of its enemies and victims, but through the eyes of those who made it—those fired-up tribunes of Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Jacques Danton, and Camille Desmoulins—devoured afterward by the beast they themselves had awakened…

“I became a writer only because I missed the chance to become a historian… I was supposed to tell myself the story of the French Revolution, but not from the point of view of its enemies, rather from that of those who made it. I think this book has always been more important to me than anything else… I don’t think anyone writes it like I do. Nobody practices this method. It’s my ideal of historical accuracy” (Hilary Mantel).