The Lambs Of London

Description

'A delicious entertainment... Ackroyd's latest foray into bygone London finds him at the top of his form' Sunday Telegraph Mary Lamb is confined by the restrictions of domesticity- her father is losing his mind, her mother watchful and hostile. The great solace of her life is her brother Charles, an aspiring writer. It is no surprise when Mary falls for the bookseller's son, 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, a world in which a clever son will stop at nothing to impress his showman father, and no one knows quite what to believe. Ingenious and vividly alive, The Lambs of London is a poignant, gripping novel of betrayal and deceit.

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. 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.

As always, Ackroyd brings the bustle, stench and hazards of nineteenth-century London vividly to life and keeps readers on their toes until the final page * Daily Mail * A marvellously adroit tale -- Penelope Lively * Independent * Energetic and clever... The Lambs of London ingeniously combines two fact-based narratives and transforms them into a detective-cum-love story * Daily Telegraph * Historically animated and emotionally fervent. Ackroyd turns the past into a private phantasmagoria of loving fakes and pungent terrors * Observer * Clever, subtle and touching, often funny and always highly intelligent. A modern novel that requires a second reading - one which will be even more enjoyable and rewarding than the first * Scotsman *