The Fall Of Troy [Paperback]

"Provoking, unsettling, ingenious -- and a delight to read."
-"Guardian"

."..skillfully interweaves classical and 19th century stories, employing motifs from both Homer and Charlotte Bronte.... Ackroyd's most exuberant novel for years."
-"Daily Mail"

`richly imagined work is as gripping as any thriller'

'Ackroyd has fashioned a gripping story about the dark passions which are unleashed when an obsessive personailty believes that an ancient text is to be interpreted literally'

"Ackroyd has written his best novel in years, a vivid narrative of a fantasist destroyed by his refusal to subjugate his vision to mundane realities"

A brilliant historical novel, set during the 19th century at the time that the Bronze Age site of Troy was being excavated, with Peter Ackroyd returning to one of his favourite themes: fakes, forgeries and plagiarism.

'Rich in atmosphere, and swings between the comic and the mysterious with impressive ease'

'Peter Ackroyd writes a vivid, gripping narrative'

'I cannot wait to bring you to the plain of Troy. To show you the place where Hector and Achilles fought. To show you the palace of Priam. And the walls where the Trojan women watched their warriors in battle with the invader. It will stir your blood, Sophia.'

Sophia Chrysanthis is only 16 when the German archaeologist Herr Obermann comes wooing: he wants a Greek bride who knows her Homer. Sophia passes his test, and soon she is tieing canvas sacking to her legs so that she can kneel on the hard ground in the trench, removing the earth methodically, identifying salient points, lifting out amphorae and bronze vessels without damaging them. 'Archaeology is not a science,' Obermann says. 'It is an art.'

Obermann is very good at the art of archaeology - perhaps too good at it.

The amosphere at Troy is tense and mysterious. Sophia finds herself increasingly baffled by the past ... not only the remote past that Obermann is so keen to share with her in the form of his beloved epics of the Trojan wars, but also his own, recent past - a past that he has chosen to hide from her.

But she, too, is very good at the art of archaeology ...

Brilliant historical novel, set during the 19th century at the time that the Bronze Age site of Troy was being excavated. Peter Ackroyd returns to one of his favourite themes: fakes, forgeries and plagiarism.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Peter Ackroyd is a prize-winning writer of fiction and non fiction. Almost all his novels are historical novels: he has a unique gift for conjuring lives and characters from the past. Hawksmoor won the Guardian fiction prize, and Chatterton (also about forgery) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent novels are the bestselling The Clerkenwell Tales and the highly praised The Lambs of London. He presented 3 TV series for the BBC - Dickens (2002), London (2004), The Romantic Poets (2006) and has written brief lives of Chaucer, Turner and Newton, and major biographies of T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, Thomas More and - most recently - Shakespeare. He holds a CBE for services to literature.