In "Growing a Tale," her 1993 essay about the process of writing fiction, Hilary Mantel confesses that "I have sat, at the moment of purest heartbreak, in mental agony, and put my thoughts on paper, and then I have taken those thoughts and allocated them to one of my characters, largely for comic effect." Those final four words startlingly shift the reader's perspective, as if the author intended to lure the reader in only to spring a trap at the end. Such traps--if indeed they deserve such a negative designation--recur throughout Mantel's novels, resulting in moments when the reader discovers humor amid horror, pleasure amid pain, the ridiculous amid the somber, and the profane amid the sacred. Mantel's novels typically blend black comedy, political intrigue, and social criticism in a manner that reveals the way the past plays upon the present and impacts people's lives in ways even the...