Bring Up the Bodies is the sequel to Mantel's 2009 Booker winner, Wolf Hall. It continues to follow the life of Thomas Cromwell, blacksmith's son now risen to Master Secretary to the King's Privy Council. King Henry VIII is tiring of his second wife Anne Boleyn, who has yet to bear him a male heir, and beginning to fall in love with Jane Seymour, a former attendant to the Queen and inhabitant of Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall is the first part of Mantel's trilogy telling a fictionalised version of the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of Henry VIII from 1534 to 1540. This first novel covers the years 1500 to 1537, beginning with an account of Cromwell's youthful abuse at the hands of his blacksmith father, and ending with the execution of Thomas More, with Cromwell overseeing as one of the most powerful men in the country.