PETER ACKROYD

THAMES: SACRED RIVER

Classic Ackroyd on a classic theme. Ackroyd follows this great river from its source to the sea and weaves his magic along the way. It covers history from prehistoric times to the present, the flora and fauna of the river, paintings and photographs inspired by the Thames, its geology, smells and colours, its literature, laws and landscape, its magic and myths, its architecture, trade and weather. The reader learns about the fishes that swim in the river and the boats that ply on its surface; about floods and tides; hauntings and suicides; miasmas and sewers; locks, weirs and embankments. Peter Ackroyd has a genius for digging out the most surprising and entertaining details, and for writing about them in the most magisterial prose.

Material: finished copies (490pp)
Sales: Chatto & Windus UK (Sept 2007); Knaus Germany; Neri Pozza Italy.

'At first, Thames: Sacred River appears a meditation upon the shared subconscious but is in fact, as with the river itself, something where one can halt at any point, cast off, and land a gem. Many readers set about Ackroyd's London: The Biography in that random fashion, as they did his less popular but equally engrossing study of the English imagination, Albion. These are hefty works which can be rewardingly snacked upon.’ Independent

'As one has come to expect from this most passionate of London chroniclers, the research and learning is daunting. And Ackroyd's gift is to write history in the idiom of a poet. As soon as you open this account of the Thames, you will want to immerse yourself in it, as though in those willow-fringed waters of Cookham. ‘ Telegraph

' Thames: Sacred River is celebratory but elegiac, which may be the natural way with rivers that run fast and dappling, then turn sluggish. But as always with Ackroyd, a London landmark in his own right, it is not just the subject that sets this book apart but also the compelling new perspectives that he brings.’ Times

'You might well think that the garlanded biographer of Dickens and Turner was born to write this extraordinary book. Ackroyd notes how great chroniclers of the Thames, from Chaucer to Conrad, have added to an outpouring of poetry and prose. His own contribution is a powerful current in this 'river of words'. Observer

‘A very enjoyable and highly idiosyncratic account of the subject. Plenty of books, sane, mad, analytical and fanciful, have been written about the River, and plenty more will be. This one I recommend strongly.' Philip Hensher, Spectator

THE FALL OF TROY

‘A novel about opposites — of truth and deception, fact and fiction, history and romance, love and loyalty. However you read The Fall of Troy — as a love story and mystery told in Homeric style, or as a deeper meditation on the relationship between reality and imagination — Ackroyd the novelist re-emerges triumphantly from the mud of his excavations.’ The Times ‘Erudite and witty. Skilfully interweaves classical and 19th century stories, employing motifs from both Homer and Charlotte Bronte. Acroyd’s most exuberant novel in years. Inspired.’ Daily Mail ‘Has the atmosphere of a thriller, with innocents running for their lives.’ Sunday Times 'It is Peter Ackroyd's remarkable achievement, in this complex and fascinating novel, to take a figure who was already a legend in his own lifetime, and recreate him as a creature of myth ... The Fall of Troy is provoking, unsettling, ingenious - and a delight to read.' Barry Unsworth, Guardian

Sophia Chrysanthis is in her twenties when the celebrated German archaeologist, Herr Obermann, seeks her out; he wants a Greek bride who is able to read Homer. Sophia passes his test, and soon she is tying canvas sacking to her legs so that she can kneel on the hard ground in the trench, removing the earth methodically, identifying salient points, lifting out amphorae and bronze vessels without damaging them. 'Archaeology is not a science,' Obermann says. 'It is an art.' Obermann is very good at the art of archaeology - perhaps too good. Obsessive and intuitive, he is a romantic visionary.
Troy is the definitive city lost and found; and Peter Ackroyd - who has a unique gift for evoking the spirit of the place - brings it electrifyingly to life in this fascinating novel. The Fall of Troy is a dazzling work of the imagination which, like the ancient epics so loved by Obermann, is in part accurate and in part fantastic. It tells stories - stories about the deaths of heroes; stories which blur the boundaries between truth and fiction, fakes and the real thing; stories of mistakes, human folly and the temptation to cover up...

Material:finished copies (215 pp)
Sales: Chatto & Windus UK (Sept 2006); Nan A Talese USA; Meulenhoff NL; Diigisi Greece; Philippe Rey France; Yapi Kredi Turkey; Olga Morozova Russia; Record Brazil; Teorema Portugal.

SHAKESPEARE: THE BIOGRAPHY

‘It really is a stupendous achievement… Peter Ackroyd back at the height of his powers… a tour de force… I thought this was absolutely tremendous.’ Sunday Times 'Fascinating. Ackroyd comes into his own as he brings sixteenth-century Stratford to life with the deftest touches.' Tatler 'Superb. The book Peter Ackroyd was born to write.' Daily Mail ‘Everything one would expect from a leading biographer at the top of his game. His recreation of Elizabethan London is masterful. He knows the plays and understands better than academic biographers how Shakespeare went about researching and writing. Ackroyd’s great gift as a biographer is his capacity to engage sympathetically with his subject. What he has accomplished is impressive. And his biography ranks with the best of them.’ Financial Times Magazine

Peter Ackroyd studies Shakespeare in the close context of the world he lived in. In this way, he not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare’s life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background. This book is packed with gems – and the reader turns the pages eagerly, keen to absorb the next nugget of information.

Material: Finished copies (546 pp)
Sales: Chatto & Windus UK; Nan A Talese/Doubleday USA; Meulenhoff NL; Knaus Germany; Neri Pozza Italy; Philippe Rey France; Edhasa Spain; Partvonal Hungary; Teorema Portugal; Diigisi Greece; CoLibri Russia; Hakusui-Sha Japan.

THE LAMBS OF LONDON

Mary Lamb is confined by the restrictions of domesticity: her father is losing his mind, her mother watchful and hostile, and their maidservant, Tizzy, elderly and infirm. The great solace of her life is her brother Charles - but he feels equally constrained by the drudgery of his work at the East India Company, taking refuge in drink while spreading his wings as a writer. Sometimes, in the evening, they study together. Mary reads what Charles reads. So it is no surprise that Mary should fall for the bookseller's son, seventeen-year-old antiquarian William Ireland, from whom Charles has purchased a book. But this is no ordinary book - it once belonged to William Shakespeare himself. And William Ireland, with his green eyes and his red hair, is no ordinary young man.........

The Lambs of London brilliantly creates an urban world of scholars and entrepreneurs, actors and theatre managers, a world in which a clever son will stop at nothing to impress his showman father, and no one knows quite what to believe. Can Mary Lamb - vulnerable, sheltered, idealistic - survive such an introduction to the many frailities of human nature?

Ingenious and vividly alive, The Lambs of London is a poignant, gripping novel of betrayal and deceit, a masterly re-enactment of London life which keeps the reader guessing until the end.

Praise for The Lambs of London:

'The Lambs of London is a delicious entertainment, faithful to it's period but done with the lightest of touches. Nobody knows this world better than Peter Ackroyd, and his latest foray into bygone London finds him at the top of his form.' The Sunday Telegraph

'The theme and setting of this novel allow Ackroyd's rare talent full scope. It is literary, clever, subtle and touching, also often funny and always highly intelligent.' The Scotsman

'his book is a loving tribute.....and a dazzling entertainment.' London Evening Standard

'..it is a delightful read, which resonates long after it has been laid aside.' The Spectator

'...touching and ingenious..' TLS

Material: Finished Copies (216 pp)
Sales: Chatto & Windus UK; Editions Philippe Rey France; Meulenhoff NL; Knaus Verlag Germany; Neri Pozza Italy; Edhasa Spain; Diigisi Greece; Inostranka Russia; Teorema Portugal.

THE CLERKENWELL TALES

'Tremendous.' Independent on Sunday 'a truly extraordinary feat of historical imagination.'Sunday Telegraph 'historical fiction of the utmost potency.' Daily Mail '...a tour-de-force, full of rich imaginings and strange happenings. Fact is interwoven with fiction in masterly fashion. You are invited to suspend disbelief and to enter into a world that is at once beautiful and filthy, noble and perverse. It is as finely wrought as an illuminated manuscript. I can’t think of another writer who could have brought it off...' The Scotsman

ALBION: THE ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH IMAGINATION
'Albion is an explosion, full of particles whizzing through air...Crammed, digressive, learned, brilliant.' Daily Telegraph

'Ackroyd covers not only literature but art, architecture, music and almost everything else that has passed through the minds of the English. Just one damn interesting thing after another.' Sunday Times

Possibly Ackroyd's most ambitious project yet, ALBION maps the creative psyche that has evolved in England from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present. Featuring myriad examples from Beowulf to Tolkein, from mystery plays to drag acts, ALBION posits a mindset defined by topography: is the green and pleasant land of England responsible for almost all of the ghost stories ever written, and why, in literature, is this land so saturated by endless, driving rain? What are English virtues? Does the humour now owe much to Anglo-Saxon riddles? An elaboration of a culture with a deeply rooted yet protean identity, this dazzling book draws on themes elaborated throughout Ackroyd's career, reaching new and inspired conclusions.(516 pages) Sales: Chatto & Windus UK; Nan A Talese/Doubleday USA; BB ART Czech Republic; Tygodnik Powszechny Poland.

'The only possible reaction is to sit back, applaud a triumph and read it again.'Daily Telegraph

'Albion is his masterpiece.'The Herald, Glasgow

LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY
'Marvellous - the book about London.' A.N Wilson, Daily Mail

'Ackroyd's superbly crafted, learned, intelligent London is the best monument the world's capital could have. It is absolutely wonderful.' John Simpson, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph

'...fizzes with vitality and originality.'Sunday Times

The long awaited work that matches subject and author perfectly. No one should or needs to read any other book on London. Much of Peter Ackroyd’s work has been concerned with the life and past of London and here is his definitive account of the city. For him London is a living organism, with its own laws of growth and change, so his LONDON is a ‘biography’ not a history. Anecdotal, brilliant and wonderfully entertaining, LONDON is animated by Ackroyd’s concern for the close relationship between the present and the past as well as by what he describes as the peculiar ‘echoic’ quality of London whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens. Material: Finished copies (822 pp) Publishers: Chatto & Windus UK; Nan A Talese Books USA; Knaus Germany; Frassinelli Italy; Stock France; Edhasa Spain; Olga Morozova Russia & Innostranaya Literatura Magazine Russia; BB Art Czech Republic.

Praise for LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY

'An erudite labour of love, a fan-letter to a fabulous city, and a book one suspects Ackroyd was destined to write. It illuminates the English character, and is darkly humorous in it's detail, tumbling through centuries crowded with legendary events and eccentric observations, as exuberant, energetic and alarming as the city itself.'Independent on Sunday

'His masterwork...A rich torrent of remarkable lists, bizarre anecdotage, stink, press and clatter, the gestures of the street, the violence and the cruelty, the beauty and the energy of this greatest and most horrible of cities. It is just fantastic.' Andrew Marr, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph

'Peter Ackroyd has written an episodically brilliant book. No one gets London quite as well as he. The biography is a kind of love poem to the city which shaped Ackroyd's imagination and granted him one of the most distinguished literary careers of the late 20th century.' Kathryn Hughes, The Sunday Telegraph

'Here is something wonderful - 'the London of labyrinth, half of stone, half of flesh', the London Peter Ackroyd was born to write about... You will not find a better, more visionary book about a place we take for granted .. if you want to know it better, to see it with your eyes wide open, then Ackroyd is your indispensable companion.'Peter Preston, The Observer

'A rich dish, this is Ackroyd's masterwork, a definitive tale of the city'.Conde Nast Traveller

‘The best known of all remarks about London is Samuel Johnson’s aphorism: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. The same could be said with equal justice of any reader who finds no pleasure or instruction in Ackroyd’s book.’ Spectator

THE PLATO PAPERS
On ritual occasions, Plato, the orator, summons the citizens of London to impart the ancient history of their city, dwelling particularly on the unhappy era of Mouldwarp (AD 1500-2300). He lectures on The Origin of Species by the 19th century novelist Charles Dickens and on Sigmund Freud; whilst providing a glossary of 20th century terms, and explaining such early myths of creation as 'super-string theory' and 'relativity'. But then he has a dream, or a vision, or he goes on a real journey (opinions are divided) and enters a vast underground cavern, where citizens of Mouldwarp London still live. On his return, Plato shares his stories of this lost world, but his words spread consternation among his felloe citizens and they quickly put him on trial for corrupting the youth with his lies and fables.

Praise for THE PLATO PAPERS (1999)

'A marvellous fable of our times … funny, wise and strange … He writes like an archangel … Ackroyd has written what we always knew that he alone of his generation could produce: a timeless, literary masterpiece.'A.N Wilson, Daily Mail

'Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite … a carefully-pulsed breath of a book with an impact that sneaks into one’s dreams.'Independent

Sales: Knaus Germany: Edhasa Spain; Teorema Portugal; BZZToH Holland; Chajak Korea; Stock France;Chatto UK; Nan Talese USA; Polirom Romania; Alma Lithuania; Zysk Poland; Livanis Greece; Inostranka Russia

PETER ACKROYD'S BRIEF LIVES SERIES
'...this series is understated and elegantly constructed, and has that re-assuring quality of tone you find in an author who could have written a book five times as long on the same subject, but who has chosen not to.' Saturday Guardian

POE: A Life Cut Short
Edgar Allan Poe's life (1809-1849) was Gothic, mysterious, theatrical, fatally flawed, original, dark, dazzling, satirical, inventive - in short, an ideal subject for Peter Ackroyd. Concise, dramatic and immensely readable, this is an essential and idiosyncratic addition to Ackroyd's canon of brilliant biographies.

Edgar Allan Poe served as a soldier and began his literary career composing verses modelled on Byron; soon he was trying out his 'prose-tales' - often horror melodramas such as "The Fall of the House of Usher." As editor of the "Literary Messenger" he was influential among critics and writers of the American South. His versatile writings - including, for example, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Raven" - continue to resonate down the centuries. Peter Ackroyd's biography of Poe opens with his end, his final days - no one knows what happened between the time when friends saw him off on the steam-boat to Baltimore and his discovery six days later dying in a tavern. This mystery sets the scene for a short life packed with drama and tragedy (drink and poverty) combined with extraordinary brilliance. Poe has been claimed as the forerunner of modern fantasy, and credited with the invention of psychological dramas (long before Freud), science fiction (before H.G. Wells and Jules Verne) and the detective story (before Arthur Conan Doyle). Tennyson described him as 'the most original genius that America has produced'.

He influenced European romanticism and was the harbinger of both Symbolism and Surrealism. Peter Ackroyd, who places significance on Poe's childhood (his travelling actor parents were miserably poor, his mother had TB and he was orphaned), claims that Poe found his family among writers - writers not only of his time but of the future generations who were influenced by the power of his imagination.

‘Wonderfully rewarding … Poe's brilliant, erratic, abbreviated career stands to gain rather than lose from the form of brief life patented by Ackroyd. A short biography is not a long one shrunk. Instead of patiently accumulated details, emotional complexity and architectural shaping, it operates by lightning strikes, atmospheric colouring, impressionistic techniques of concision and suggestion. ‘ Guardian

‘There is a relentless quality to Peter Ackroyd's book. The unfaltering rhythm of his prose, the repeated phrases and devices, suggest a claustrophobic sense of inevitability. Poe's difficult nature and the economics of the US literary scene in the first half of the 19th century combine in Ackroyd's hands to create a trap from which every escape leads to unhappiness... The result is unsettling but hugely powerful. ‘ Times

'Ackroyd is clearly fascinated with his subject. He makes the reader want to re-read Poe, and indeed to read more of Ackroyd on Poe.’ Scotsman

Material: Finished copies (UK publication February 2008)
Sales: Atena Finland; Editions Philippe Rey France.

Already published in the series:

CHAUCER
‘Chaucer, is a natural subject for Ackroyd. He was a man in the thick of late 14th-century society: a diplomat, customs officer, court official, member of parliament, justice of the peace. He served three kings, and it speaks highly for his negotiator’s talents that he was liked by all of them. He went abroad, and it was on trips to Genoa and Florence that he may have come across the works of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch that so influenced his own. And he spent much of his time in London. Ackroyd is never better than when describing how the suburban egg- and bread-sellers crowded in each morning through the arch of Aldgate, above which Chaucer lived; or when, in an obscure court case, he can give Chaucer’s own account of a stroll one morning down Friday Street. ‘ Times

TURNER
'Gets closer to the heart of Turner than a book ten times as long. Everything seems pertinent, vivid and miraculously revealed. Ackroyd has a sure instinct for what matters.' Mail on Sunday

NEWTON
‘This is a wonderfully writerly book, never less than elegant in construction and execution, and the product of a lifetime's reading and research. Most important of all, Ackroyd knows how to tell a story. His Isaac Newton is a strange man indeed: emotionally wounded by parental neglect and step-parental disregard in childhood, a difficult, wilful, hypersensitive narcissist in adulthood, but equipped with this extraordinarily original and elastic imagination that allowed him to venture intellectually where no man had gone before. You really get a sense of his intense solitude: he is the only man of his time clever enough to know what he is doing, and yet he feels intensely threatened by even the smallest criticism. In particular, the rivalry with Robert Hooke is beautifully coloured in. And the maths is explained with considerable skill and the lightest of touches. ‘ Spectator

Material: Paperback copies
Sales: Chatto & Windus UK; Nan A Talese/Doubleday USA; Editions Philippe Rey France

PETER ACKROYD was born in London in 1949. He achieved a Double First at Cambridge and studied in America at Yale as a Mellon Fellow. His first two publications were books of poetry; his first biography was about Ezra Pound and his first novel was about Oscar Wilde. He is a successful novelist, author of such classics as CHATTERTON, HAWKSMORE, THE LAST TESTAMENT OF OSCAR WILDE and has also written biographies of T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake and Thomas More. He has written and presented several TV series for the BBC (including Dickens and London).   Author photo by Walter White www.walterwhite.co.uk