The Clerkenwell Tales - Softcover

Ackroyd, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400075955 ISBN 13: 9781400075959

Publisher: Anchor, 2005

Synopsis

From the foremost contemporary chronicler of London’s history, a suspenseful novel that ingeniously draws on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to recreate the city’s 14th century religious and political intrigues. London, 1399. Sister Clarice, a nun born below Clerkenwell convent, is predicting the death of King Richard II and the demise of the Church. Her visions can be dismissed as madness, until she accurately foretells a series of terrorist explosions. What is the role of the apocalyptic Predestined Men? And the clandestine Dominus? And what powers, ultimately, will prevail?In Peter Ackroyd’s deft and suprising narrative, The Miller, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath and other characters from Canterbury Tales pursue these mysteries through a pungently vivid medieval London.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"The Clerkenwell Tales is a truly extraordinary feat of historical imagination: a slim novel, straining at the seams with a sort of macabre relish, in which disgust and enthusiasm jostle."
--The Sunday Telegraph

"A gripping thriller which also happens to be wonderfully full of engaging historical detail and conversation-enhancing words like 'hopharlot.'" --Literary Review

"[The Clerkenwell Tales] is a pacy novel brimming with Ackroyd's imaginative use of scholarship. This is more than a reworking of earlier material, be it Chaucer's or his own. Ackroyd is clearly out to impress, and it's worked." --The Daily Telegraph

"Historical fiction of the utmost potency." --The Daily Mail

"Ackroyd's 'colour' is so curious, so rich and so variegated that there is something in almost every sentence to sharpen one's sense of late 14th-century London as squirmingly alive--and extremely pungent . . . a cunning little intrigue." --The Spectator

"Ackroyd's learning is as impressive as his imagination . . . Like Chaucer, Ackroyd sees literature and history as part of the same tradition. --The Observer

"The Clerkenwell Tales is a tour-de-force, full of rich imaginings and strange happenings. It is as finely wrought as an illuminated manuscript." --The Scotsman

From the Inside Flap:

From a master historian -- a brilliantly original historical novel set in late-14th century London.
""I am sister to the day and night. I am sister to the woods." Sister Clarisse, a nun in the House of St. Mary at Clerkenwell, experiences visions. She dreams of the English King. Are her prophesies the babblings of the crazed? Or can she "see" a future in which Henry Bolingbroke overthrows Richard II?
This clever and colourful novel begins with "The Nun's Tale, and continues with "The Friar's Tale, "The Merchant's Tale and "The Clerk's Tale. Thus, story by story, Peter Ackroyd builds his portrait of medieval London. The people are disenchanted with the Church, with its wealth and corruption, its Pope in Rome and its Pope in Avignon. But heresy is dangerous -- almost as dangerous as rebellion. This is a novel about spies and counterspies, radicals and idealists, murderers and arsonists, sects and secret societies. It is a tale richly atmospheric and satisfying in its historical detail.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400075955
• ISBN 13: 9781400075959
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224