Hilary Mantel recently won the Man Booker prize with her Tudor tome about Thomas Cromwell, Bring Up the Bodies—the sequel to Wolf Hall, which also won the Man Booker in 2009. Her much-praised second win could yet again garner another award; it has made it onto the shortlist for Waterstones’ Book of the Year. The only other fiction title on the shortlist is HHhH by Laurent Binet, a thriller in which two men are on a mission to kill Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi secret services.

The non-fiction books competing for Book of the Year includes The Old Ways, a journey through British landscapes; Polpo, the Italian cuisine book; On the Map, an examination of maps from the past, present and future; and Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, a biography about a war hero and esteemed travel writer.

The winner will be announced on 29 November, and will receive major support from Waterstones during the important shopping month of December, and a case of champagne.

The shortlist:
HHhH, by Laurent Binet (Harvill Secker)
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artemis Cooper (John Murray)
On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way It Does, by Simon Garfield (Profile Books)
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton)
Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate) — read an excerpt
Polpo: A Venetian Cookbook (Of Sorts), by Russell Norman (Bloomsbury)

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