Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor - part of the limited edition PENGUIN STREET ART series: timeless writing, enduring design. 'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe' So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . . 'Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed' Independent on Sunday Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. A novelist, biographer and historian, he has been the literary editor of The Spectator and chief book reviewer for the The Times, as well as writing several highly acclaimed books including a biography of Dickens and London: The Biography. He lives in London. The PENGUIN STREET ART series marries timeless writing with enduring design. Some of the world's leading street artists have designed new covers especially for ten classic contemporary books from Penguin: Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd / Armadillo by William Boyd / And The Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave / What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe / Americana by Don DeLillo / Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris / The Reluctant Fundamentalistby Mohsin Hamid / The Believers by Zoe Heller / How to Be Good by Nick Hornby / Lights out for the Territory by Iain Sinclair

Hawksmoor

The first entry in a six-volume epic traces the birth of England, documenting the region's primeval origins through the death of Henry VII and covering the construction of Stonehenge, the establishment of common law, and the roles of successive invasions.

The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors

Foundation

*** A Sunday Times Bestseller *** In Roman Londinium the city was dotted with lupanaria (‘wolf dens’ or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS. Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.

Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Queer City

The Biography

London

Sheds new light on the life of the great Elizabethan playwright and poet, reassessing Shakespeare's work within the context of sixteenth-century London and Stratford-upon-Avon, as well as his lasting legacy for world literature.

Shakespeare

The author of London: The Biography presents a chronicle of London's underground network of rivers, labyrinths and chambers and how they have been used in various time periods, from sewers and amphitheaters to crypts and tube stations.

The Secret History Beneath the Streets

London Under

Examines the Stuart dynasty during a turbulent seventeenth century marked by civil war, the execution of Charles I, the rule of Oliver Cromwell, and the deposition and exile of James II.

Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

In 1880, with London's poverty-stricken Limehouse district being terrorized by a series of brutal murders, Elizabeth Cree is on trial for the poisoning of her husband, but she may also be the one person who knows the truth about the killings. By the author of Hawksmoor.

A Novel of the Limehouse Murders

The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

Dickens was a landmark biography when first published in 1990. This specially edited shorter edition takes the reader into the life of one of the world's greatest writers. Here, Ackroyd attempts to peel away the mask of a man whose life was outwardly a picture of Victorian rectitude, but whose love life was as complicated (and unconventional) as any modern writer's. Dickens had everything - fame, success and riches - but he died harbouring a deep sadness he had experienced all his life. He was a man of mercurial character, had enormous vitality and humour, but he also had a sense of loss and longing that would constantly appear in his work. Like many eminent Victorians, he led a double life: although he insisted that nothing in the newspapers he edited should upset his middle-class readers, he regularly indulged in dubious night-time escapades with fellow author Wilkie Collins, and, for the last 13 years of his life, kept a secret mistress.

Dickens

"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"--Publisher

Mr Cadmus

Innovation, the sixth and final volume in Peter Ackroyd's magnificent History of England series, takes readers from the Boer War to the Millenium Dome almost a hundred years later. Innovation brings Peter Ackroyd's History of England to a triumphant close. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end of the twentieth century, when his great-granddaughter Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost five decades. A century of enormous change, encompassing two world wars, four monarchs (Edward VII, George V, George VI and the Queen), the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the Labour Party, women's suffrage, the birth of the NHS, the march of suburbia and the clearance of the slums. It was a period that saw the work of the Bloomsbury Group and T.S. Eliot, of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, of the end of the post-war slump to the technicolour explosion of the 1960s, to free love and punk rock and from Thatcher to Blair. A vividly readable, richly peopled tour de force, it is Peter Ackroyd writing at the height of his powers.

History of England

Innovation

The History of England

Tudors

An unlikely friendship between a pair of nineteenth-century Oxford students including researcher Victor Frankenstein and poet Percy Bysshe Shelly is marked by disparate religious beliefs that lead to Victor's grisly experimentations with corpses.

A Novel

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

The timeless story of love, enchantment, adventure, heroism and betrayal, brought to new life for our times. Born with the help of Merlin's magic, blessed with the sword of Excalibur, Arthur becomes King of a troubled, leaderless England, beginning a golden age of chivalry at the court of Camelot. But the reign of Arthur is soon to be torn apart. As whispers of his wife Guinevere's infidelity with Arthur's favoured knight, Sir Lancelot, intensify, loyalties become divided. Gradually, the fellowship of the Round Table is broken. And when Arthur's treacherous son, Mordred, plots against his own father, a bloody cycle of violence, revenge and tragedy ensues. Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur made the legend of King Arthur, immortal. Peter Ackroyd's new retelling transforms this richly inventive medieval epic into a dramatic modern story. Bringing to life a world of bravery and majesty, yet imbued with a sense of fate and loss, this is a magical and moving evocation of humanity's endless search for perfection.

Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur : a Retelling

The Death of King Arthur

The language and way of thinking of the Venetians set them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides, rather than the land. The moon rules Venice, Ackroyd writes 'It is built on ocean shells and ocean ground; it has the aspect of infinity'.

Pure City

Venice

Provides an incisive portrait of William Blake that reassesses the true nature of the life and art of the enigmatic poet, painter, and engraver and places Blake and his unique, mystical art within the context of eighteenth-century thought

Blake

A prose translation of the classic 14th-century poem seeks to retain Chaucer's vigorous and bawdy style while rendering its contents more accessible to modern readers, in a version that places an emphasis on the humanity of key characters.

The Canterbury Tales

Revolution, the fourth volume of Peter Ackroyd's enthralling History of England begins in 1688 with a revolution and ends in 1815 with a famous victory. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from William of Orange's accession following the Glorious Revolution to the Regency, when the flamboyant Prince of Wales ruled in the stead of his mad father, George III, and England was - again - at war with France, a war that would end with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Late Stuart and Georgian England marked the creation of the great pillars of the English state. The Bank of England was founded, as was the stock exchange, the Church of England was fully established as the guardian of the spiritual life of the nation and parliament became the sovereign body of the nation with responsibilities and duties far beyond those of the monarch. It was a revolutionary era in English letters, too, a time in which newspapers first flourished and the English novel was born. It was an era in which coffee houses and playhouses boomed, gin flowed freely and in which shops, as we know them today, began to proliferate in our towns and villages. But it was also a time of extraordinary and unprecedented technological innovation, which saw England utterly and irrevocably transformed from a country of blue skies and farmland to one of soot and steel and coal.

A History of England

Revolution

'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent The penultimate volume of Peter Ackroyd’s masterful History of England series, Dominion begins in 1815 as national glory following the Battle of Waterloo gives way to post-war depression, spanning the last years of the Regency to the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901. In it, Ackroyd takes us from the accession of the profligate George IV whose government was steered by Lord Liverpool, who was firmly set against reform, to the reign of his brother, William IV, the 'Sailor King', whose reign saw the modernization of the political system and the abolition of slavery. But it was the accession of Queen Victoria, aged only eighteen, that sparked an era of enormous innovation. Technological progress – from steam railways to the first telegram – swept the nation and the finest inventions were showcased at the first Great Exhibition in 1851. The emergence of the middle classes changed the shape of society and scientific advances changed the old pieties of the Church of England, and spread secular ideas across the nation. But though intense industrialization brought boom times for the factory owners, the working classes were still subjected to poor housing, long working hours and dire poverty. It was a time that saw a flowering of great literature, too. As the Georgian era gave way to that of Victoria, readers could delight not only in the work of Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth but also the great nineteenth-century novelists: the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Thackeray, and, of course, Dickens, whose work has become synonymous with Victorian England. Nor was Victorian expansionism confined to Britain alone. By the end of Victoria’s reign, the Queen was also an Empress and the British Empire dominated much of the globe. And, as Ackroyd shows in this richly populated, vividly told account, Britannia really did seem to rule the waves.

Peter Ackroyd

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