On 'Land'

Hilary Mantel sold an awful lot of books, but what is her literary legacy? Since her Wolf Hall trilogy, historical fiction has earned itself more space on the “New Fiction” table, surely in part by learning some lessons from her example. Some novels showing her influence would include Clare Pollard’s The Modern Fairies and Lauren Groff’s Matrix. The selling style involves one or more of the following: the use of the present tense, an abundance of physical, sometimes lurid, detail, and, if length permits, an overdetermined, overexplained sort of character psychology.