Here are 2 novels that are on many a wish list. Hillary Mantel’s The  Mirror and the Light concludes his trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s boy who became an counselor to Henry VIII.  He has defeated the Boylen’s, but his own perch on power is unsteady. In Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, a native American woman leaves the rez in search of her older sister, during a period when the reservation system is under fire and native identity uncertain.