Mr Cadmus

Description

The arrival of an enigmatic stranger wreaks havoc on the denizens of the idyllic English village of Little Camborne; most notably two apparently harmless women. Miss Finch and Miss Swallow, cousins, have put their pasts behind them and settled into conventional country life. But when Theodore Cadmus - from Caldera, a Mediterranean island nobody has heard of - moves into the middle cottage, the safe monotony of their lives is shattered. The fates of the two cousins and Mr Cadmus, and those of Little Camborne and Caldera, become inextricably enmeshed. Long-hidden secrets and long-held grudges threaten to surface, drawing all into a vortex of subterfuge, theft, violence, mayhem...and murder.

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning author of novels including Hawksmoor, Chatterton and The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, biographies of Ezra Pound, Blake and Dickens among others, and acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography and Thames: Sacred River. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

A darkly witty fable ... a tale of vengeance that begins to take on the swerving, lurid velocity of a fever dream * * Spectator * * Entertaining and wildly unpredictable, with a soupcon of the supernatural * * Daily Mail * * Mr Cadmus is a treat of a tale. To a "polite" English village add a sprinkling of sinister. The result? Cosy and twisted, comic and gothic, with a show-stealing parrot -- JESS KIDD Murderous intrigue plays out against a backdrop of curtain-twitching small-town banality in this playful black comedy * * Sunday Times * * Follows the mysterious Mr Cadmus who hails from a Mediterranean island nobody has heard of and turns life in the idyllic English village of Little Camborne upside down * * The Times, Best books to look out for * * Blackly comic . . . as the body count mounts, Ackroyd's novel moves beyond Midsomer Murders territory and into the realm of the truly weird * * Daily Mail * * Praise for Peter Ackroyd: Extraordinary, amazing, vivid, convincing. [Ackroyd's] view of life questions the role not just of the novel but of art and history, memory, time and much else * * Financial Times * * A novel remarkable for [its] power, ingenuity and subtlety * * London Review of Books * * Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed * * Independent on Sunday * *