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  • Published: 3 October 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446484135
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Three Brothers




Rapier-sharp, witty, intriguing and mysterious: a new novel from Peter Ackroyd, set in 1960s London

Three Brothers follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway, born on a post-war council estate in Camden Town. Marked out from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world – a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords, of newspaper magnates, back-biters and petty thieves.

London is the backdrop and the connecting fabric of these three lives, reinforcing Ackroyd’s grand theme that place and history create, surround and engulf us. From bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed London publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs. Everything is possible – not only in the new freedom of the 1960s but also in London’s timeless past.

  • Published: 3 October 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446484135
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

About the author

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

Also by Peter Ackroyd

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Praise for Three Brothers

Suffused with Ackroyd’s intelligence and learning

Jessica Holland, Observer

Ackroyd’s pen portraits of the intersecting worlds of academia, literary London and Fleet Street are written with relish

Laura Freeman, Standpoint

An amalgam of social satire and noirish thriller...vintage Ackroyd

Ian Thomson, Financial Times

Consistently intriguing

Edmund Gordon, Times Literary Supplement

Superb... [Ackroyd] makes the familiar deliciously mysterious

Saga

London is the backdrop and the connecting fabric of these three lives, from bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed London publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs

The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Ackroyd is that timeless figure, a man of letters, dipped in ink, apparently versatile in a breathtaking variety of genres

Observer

A camp clever tour de force… an alternative autobiography, a ghost story and a murder mystery all in one slim volume. Brilliant… the quintessence of Ackroyd

Sunday Telegraph

A book full of rich and sudden moments of delight

The Scotsman

Harking back to Dickens... London is a major character in the novel. In Ackroyd's accomplished hands the city becomes a mystical place, where visions abound. Highly recommended.

Daily Mail

* Cultural pick of the week *

Mail on Sunday

In a slender novel, London's great fictional mapper Peter Ackroyd has woven together a rich spread of tales of the city

Tina Jackson, Metro

Ackroyd writes about the capital, from Camden to Chelsea, like no-one else and he captures the sense of the sixties perfectly, with high-society and low-life London so dangerously close to each other. Full of twists and turns, this is Ackroyd's most exciting novel to date

Good Book Guide

A classic Ackroyd tale that will not fail to please

Victoria Clark, 4 stars, Lady