Books of the month: From Hilary Mantel’s ‘The Mirror & the Light’ to Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Hamnet’

Martin Chilton reviews six of March’s releases for our monthly book column

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Thomas Cromwell and William Shakespeare are brought brilliantly to life in new novels by Hilary Mantel (The Mirror & the Light) and Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet). The novelists, both giants of modern literature, are astute chroniclers of the human experience, and their respective works of historical fiction are rich with the sights, smells and textures of 16th-century England. As you would expect, they are also full of penetrating insights into two remarkable characters.

March is also a boom month for memoirs set in the 1970s. Stuart Maconie’s The Nanny State Made Me is part-witty memoir and part-stirring defence of the benefits of the welfare state; while Pete Paphides’s Broken Greek is an amusing tale of growing up and being influenced by music, football and television. House of Glass by Hadley Freeman is an achingly poignant history of her Jewish family and the traumas it faced in the 20th century. All five books mentioned so far, along with Adam Mars-Jones’s novella Box Hill, are reviewed in full below.

Paphides was an elective mute as a young child, as was Greta Thunberg. Our House is on Fire: Scenes from a Family and Planet in Crisis (Allen Lane) by Malena and Beata Ernman, and Svante and Thunberg tells the family story of the teenage climate activist. Thunberg was taken to the Centre for Eating Disorders in Sweden and diagnosed with high-functioning autism. “We could formally diagnose her with selective mutism, too, but that often goes away on its own with time,” her mother was told. Happily, she found a voice – and it’s one our crumbling world needs to hear.