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  • Published: 1 August 2002
  • ISBN: 9781860468308
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $39.99

Capital




Roaming from the Dark Ages to the future, Maureen Duffy's classic novel imaginatively evokes London and all its changing histories, characters and textures.

A lone Londoner maps the city, hearing beneath its surface the urgent whispers of the past. As he listens he grows convinced they are predicting London's future.

Meepers, homeless and dishevelled, yet an enlightened and mystically knowing amateur archaeologist, seeks to understand the destruction of London in the Dark Ages, hoping to predict the capital's future. A university historian, writes to his absent wife as he prepares for the start of term. He once rejected for publication a 'crackpot' article by Meepers, and is alarmed to find he has appeared at his first lecture. And now the man seems to be following him everywhere he goes.

In a dazzling mixture of contemporary life and period speech, London is illuminated through the voices of Neanderthal man, Saxon kings, anonymous invaders, the flea that spread the Black Death and the transsexual King Elizabeth.

  • Published: 1 August 2002
  • ISBN: 9781860468308
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $39.99

About the author

Maureen Duffy

Maureen Duffy was an English poet, playwright, novelist and non-fiction author who published over 60 works. Long an activist covering such issues as gay rights and animal rights, she campaigned especially on behalf of authors. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of King’s College London, a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature, and held honorary DLitts from the universities of Loughborough and Kent.

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Praise for Capital

Her subject is London, its past and its fate... A cabaret of voices from the past cut in and out of her narrative as, firm in her locus, she moves back and forth in time. Her city takes on the dimensions of the City of Man - or Woman. I closed the book intending to reopen it as soon as possible to see what I might have missed

Observer

Excellent

Alex Preston, Observer

Louis MacNeice would have relished the fiction. So will all who care for London

Guardian