Shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize

• Hilary Mantel

WOLF HALL

BY HILARY MANTEL

"Lock (Thomas] Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning," says Thomas More, "and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money." Hilary Mantel's dazzling novel – the best-selling Man Booker prizewinner ever – charts the inexorable rise to power of the master fixer of Henry VIII's England as his wilful royal master turns the country inside out through divorce and remarriage.

THE GLASS ROOM

BY SIMON MAWER

Viktor Landauer, a Jewish Czech industrialist commissions a modernistic house, all glass and minimalism, for his young bride. It is 1928, and these are still days of hope in the new nation, before both are extinguished by the rising power of the Nazis. Mawer uses the history of the house – which is soon turned into a Nazi biological testing unit – to frame the story of the Landauer family as they flee the approaching Holocaust. A masterful story of love and loss in times of turmoil.

LUSTRUM

BY ROBERT HARRIS

It's 63BC, and Cicero is Consul of Rome, although he has no shortage of potential rivals, from the psychopathic Catilina to the enigmatic Caesar. Harris writes about the psychology of power with an insider's knowledge, giving a clear picture not only of how Cicero's oratory and political astuteness sway the Senate his way, but also of the shifting alliances being formed against him, especially as his own overweening pride makes him an increasingly bigger target for conspiracy.

SACRED HEARTS

BY SARAH DUNANT

Superb characterisation and brilliantly realised power struggles within a 16th century Italian convent in Ferrara as 16-year-old Serafina seeks to escape, having been sent there by her family after an illicit love affair. Rebellion, ecstasies and hysterias are all part of her campaign against a formidably astute abbess. Love, jealousy, suspense and political intrigue all mingle in this historically accurate and atmospheric story set within a claustrophobic closed community.

THE QUICKENING MAZE

BY ADAM FOULDS

Two poets from different classes (John Clare and Alfred Tennyson) meet in 1840 at the private asylum in Epping Forest at which Clare and Tennyson's brothers are both patients. As Clare's mind runs through the "maze" of madness, he tries to hold onto sanity through recalling his childhood's affinity with nature. A beautifully written evocation of insanity that nevertheless also conveys an age in which industrialisation was clawing at the rural world in which Clare felt most at home.

STONE'S FALL

BY IAIN PEARS

Intricately plotted novel with three different narrators, all centring round the death of one of them – a plutocrat who falls to his death in his London home in 1909. Like Balzac in its sweep across society – from bustling Tyneside shipyards to the salons of Biarritz to a rather vampiric Venice – and like Buchan in its narrative drive, its centrepiece is a riveting account of an attempt to forestall an 1880s banking crisis that could have brought Britain to its knees.

HODD

BY ADAM THORPE

Scintillating take on the legend of Robin Hood which effortlessly takes the reader inside the medieval world. In extreme old age, a monk recants his folly in writing ballads that cast the outlaw leader in a heroic light. The reality, he shows, was entirely different – the real Hood he encountered was nothing more than a heretical psychopath. Like Wolf Hall in rethinking conventional interpretations of the past while still retaining a convincing sense of both time and place.