Wolf Hall was the publishing phenomenon of 2009, and is on course to be this year’s as well. Hilary Mantel, author of what is likely to become the best-selling Booker prizewinner of all time, says that the new paperback edition has been launched in two versions, one with a white background and the other black, so that bookshops can make chessboard displays out of the huge piles they receive.

Its success is one in the eye to those who bemoan the short attention span of modern readers. Wolf Hall is a big, fat book and its 672 pages take us into the minutiae of the world of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister. Like War and Peace, it has a helpful introductory section listing the characters. This runs to eight pages.

Her achievement in creating a rivetting page-turner is all the more remarkable because most of us know how the story will turn out — with most of the protagonists losing their heads.

Next month, she will be in Oxford for one of the fastest selling events of the Oxford Literary Festival. In an interview with The Oxford Times, which is sponsoring her talk, she said she hoped to give people an insight into the world she has been living in since she started researching the book more than six years ago. “I hope to get people to revise what they think of Thomas Cromwell.

“I am working on a sequel, in which I hope to look at some of his projects of social and economic reform, which were never put into practice. He had some interesting ideas that dealt with things like employment, that would have changed England. Some of this will come as a bit of a surprise to people.”

Wolf Hall does indeed come as a big shock to a generation raised on the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, in which Thomas More, beheaded in 1535 for opposing Henry’s divorce from his first wife, was portrayed by Paul Schofield as a principled martyr. Leo McKern played Cromwell as the embodiment of evil, and this is how he still appears in much popular romantic fiction set in Tudor England. Both Thomas More and Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn were found guilty on evidence gathered by Cromwell. Many people felt it was only fair that, four years later, Cromwell himself was led to the block.

But Hilary Mantel has a soft spot for him. “Cromwell’s world is not one that we are accustomed to, whereas we are more familiar at looking at things from the viewpoint of Thomas More or Henry VIII’s wives. If you change the viewpoint, you get a different story.”

She believes that 1960s liberals created More in their own image, and hopes her readers will look at Cromwell, less principled, more pragmatic, as “a man who could take us out of an economic crisis”. Certainly, you don’t have to look far for illustrations of the power of the landed gentry being eroded by financiers in Antwerp or Florence.

Before Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel was a successful writer, producing ten critically acclaimed novels over 25 years. She also wrote a well-received memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, describing how an undiagnosed medical condition — endometriosis — gave her years of pain which resulted in her being admitted to mental hospital. An operation made her infertile but failed to cure her, and steroid treatment made her weight balloon. Her latest book sold a phenomenal 200,000 copies in hardback, moving her into a different league, and the resultant publicity has meant she has needed some of the discipline which has enabled her to write for years against a background of ill-health.

She said: “Your writing time does inevitably get squeezed, but in my mind the two books are one project, so it is not that I have ever stopped thinking about it.”

Since her hero will have lost his head by the end of her next book, there’s no possibility of another sequel, and she is working on a novel set in 1980s Africa. However, she said: “I wouldn’t rule out another historical novel.”

She added: “You are very aware that people are waiting for this new book. It gives you lots of confidence and energy.”

Hilary Mantel will be interviewed by crime writer PD James at Oxford Literary Festival on March 28. Wolf Hall is published in paperback by Fourth Estate at £8.99.