The Lambs of London - Softcover

Ackroyd, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099472090 ISBN 13: 9780099472094

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2005

Synopsis

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 red hair is no ordinary young man.

In The Lambs of London, Peter Ackroyd 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.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

A tour de force in the tradition of Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Chatterton, a gripping novel of betrayal and deceit set in the teeming streets of 19th-century London.
At the centre of this intriguing, irresistible novel are the young Lambs: Charles, constrained by the tedium of his work as clerk at the East India Company, taking refuge in a drink or three too many while spreading his wings as a young writer, and his clever, adoring sister Mary, confined by domesticity, an ailing, dotty father and a maddening mother . . . Into their lives comes William Ireland, an ambitious 17-year-old antiquarian and bookseller, anxious not only to impress his demanding showman of a father, but to make his mark on the literary world. When Ireland turns up a document in the handwriting of Shakespeare himself, he takes Mary into his confidence - but soon scholars and actors alike are beating a path to the little bookshop in Holborn Passage.
Touching and tragic, ingenious, funny and vividly alive, this is Ackroyd at the top of his form in a masterly retelling of a 19th-century drama which keeps the reader guessing right to the end.

About the Author:

Peter Ackroyd has won many prizes for his fiction including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He is the author of biographies of Dickens, Blake and Thomas More and of the bestselling London: The Biography and Illustrated London, as well as Albion.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0099472090
• ISBN 13: 9780099472094
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256