Keep your head

From blacksmith's son to the most powerful man in England, and then to the executioner's block.

Next Thursday, an epic journey comes to a bloody end with the release of The Mirror and The Light by Hilary Mantel.

Her fictional retelling of the life of Thomas CromwellEnglish lawyer and statesman (1485-1540). During the reign of Henry VIII, he began the English Reformation. is a literary phenomenon.

The first two novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, sold over five million copies worldwide, won the Booker PrizeSheldrake won the Royal Society Science Book Prize and £25,000. , and have been adapted for stage and TV. Bookshops will open early on 5 March as fans queue to get their hands on the final book in the trilogy.

Mantel has her own extraordinary story. A muteMantel had "elective mutism", an anxiety disorder common in small children making it difficult to speak. child from a small English town, she found her voice in writing, but suffered many years from a mysterious debilitatingAn illness that makes someone weak, affecting their ability to live a normal life. and painful illness, later diagnosed as endometriosisAn abnormality of the uterus, causing chronic pain and infertility..

She struggled through treatment and surgery, and was told by her doctors to stop writing. She didn't listen and the results are some of the most important fiction of our age.

In these three books, she takes one of history's villains and makes him the hero of his own story.

In an age of rigid hierarchy, Cromwell uses his intelligence and hard work to rise from the bottom of society to the highest political office. Mantel lets us into his thoughts as he secures the divorce of Henry VIII's first wife and the execution of his second. Dead for centuries, Cromwell comes to life on the page.

Each book has taken years of work and historians applaud Mantel's meticulous research. But she has her critics. Historian John Guy worries that readers treat her novels as true history. Diane Purkiss at Oxford University criticises Mantel for putting 21st-Century thoughts into the mind of a 16th-Century man. It's anachronisticSomething belonging to the wrong time period., like "having him drive a car".

But historians have always looked down on historical fiction, argues author Jane Smiley. The power of fiction is to explore truths that are beyond facts. A writer uses imagination to "see the world through her character's point of view" and create a deeper understanding about people's inner worlds.

So, are stories truer than facts?

Historical fiction is just entertainment, argue some. It is escapism. A good story. And it should not be confused with serious historical scholarship. Historians do not make things up, but analyse the evidence and construct a balanced and impartial view of events. Fiction may use facts as a starting point, but its objective is completely different and it takes its readers away from truth and not towards it.

But others say, we live our lives through stories. From gossip at the bus stop to the ten o'clock news, stories are how we make sense of the world and understand our fears, hopes, and dreams. And those of other people. A historian can tell us what Cromwell did and how he died, but Mantel gives us an impression of what it felt like to be him: to rise from nowhere, to wield power and then to lose it all.