Peter Ackroyd

hawksmoor

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Four BBC Radio 4 Dramas

Tales of London: Hawksmoor and others

Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Queer City

Alfred Hitchcock

Charlie Chaplin

Three Brothers

Wilkie Collins

Orlando

Introduction by Peter Ackroyd

Jack The Ripper and the East End

The Concise Biography

London

London Under

Abridged

Dickens

with an introduction by Peter Ackroyd

The Christmas Stories

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Spectres Through Time

The English Ghost

The Immortal Legend

The Death of King Arthur

Venice

The Canterbury Tales: A retelling by Peter Ackroyd

The Essential Poe

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

A Life Cut Short

Hawksmoor

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Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed

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

A novel remarkable for [its] power, ingenuity and subtlety

Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor was first published in 1985. Alternating between the eighteenth century, when Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Christopher Wren, builds seven London churches that house a terrible secret, and the 1980s, when London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sight of certain old churches, Hawksmoor is a brilliant tale of darkness and shadow.

'There is no Light without Darknesse 
and no Substance without Shaddowe' 
 
So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the 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.

Novelist, biographer and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. From a working-class family in west London, he got a scholarship to Cambridge and went on to Yale. He was literary editor of the Spectator and then chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times for many years. He has written over a dozen novels as well as acclaimed biographies of Eliot and Dickens, and a history of London.

Hawksmoor

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Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed

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

A novel remarkable for [its] power, ingenuity and subtlety

About Peter Ackroyd

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