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.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.