The Clerkenwell Tales
Author(s): Peter Ackroyd
The scene is London, in 1399. It is the last year of the fourteenth century, and there is talk of an apocalypse. Richard II is on the throne, yet strange signs and portents are troubling the latter part of his reign. By the side of the River Fleet in Clerkenwell the people are restless, disenchanted with the church and their King. The streets of London are rife with rumour, heresy, espionage and murder and at the centre of the confusion is the nun, Sister Clarice, who has been vouchsafed visions of the future. Is she a genuine prophet, or the tool of earthly powers?
This is a story of adventure and suspense set in the late medieval world. As in many of Peter Ackroyd's novels the distant past is no longer a foreign country but something alarmingly close and authentic. As one critic has put it, 'he is our age's greatest London imagination'.
General Information
- :
- : vinteb
- : vinteb
- : 0.16
- : 01 April 2004
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Peter Ackroyd
- : Paperback
- : New edition
- : 823.914
- : 224
More About The Product
'A truly extraordinary feat of historical imagination' Sunday Telegraph'The Clerkenwell Tales is a brilliantly imagined thriller' Guardian
""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"
Peter Ackroyd lives in London. He is the author of biographies of Dickens, Blake and Thomas More and of the bestselling London: The Biography. His most recent book is Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination. His novels are listed opposite with * beside the historical novels.
