Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club, a monthly bit of book chat, where today we're talking about Hillary Mantles, Wolf Hall, a widely acclaimed and Booker Prize-winning novel. When I say we, I include Jacob Weissberg, the chairman of the Slate Group. Hi, Jacob.

Hi, Troy. And we have here John Swansberg, Slate's culture editor. Great to be here.

That makes me Troy Patterson. I write about television and such for this magazine. But right now,

I'm also going to read you an ad. And that is an ad for audible.com, our beloved sponsor, which offers more than 50,000 downloadable audio books.

If you sign up for one book-a-month subscription to Audible through our URL, you'll get a credit good for one free book, yours to keep, even if you cancel your subscription.

The address there is www.audiblepodcast.com slash slate, and I'm sure that there's no doubt

that you can pick up a wolfhole there.

And it's very good.

I don't know the name of the reader, but I read it sort of toggling between the printed

text and listening to the Audible version, as I want it sort of toggling between the printed text and listening

to the Audible version, as I am wont to do recently with a lot of books, and it's a good way

to do it.

And how did that experience affect your understanding of will fall here?

I think it helped.

For some reason, it helps partly because the A audible, the reading aloud slows you down.

And I don't mean to jump the gun a little bit, but this is sort of a hard book in a lot of ways to get oriented in.

And just slowing down helps a lot when you're trying to get a grip on the five-page cast of characters.

Right.

All right.

So what we have here, Wolf Hall is about Henry the 8th and one or two of his six wives.

And we're spending time primarily.

The protagonist is Thomas Cromwell, the first Earl of Essex, and Henry's chief minister in the 1530s. So as such, this is a

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