Peter Ackroyd's Plato's Papers is an extraordinary novel, which, as with the best of Ackroyd's fiction, treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre so elegantly mastered by Ackroyd in his now classic studies Dickens, T S Eliot and most recently The Life of Thomas More. The Plato Papers is a wonderfully observed satire on the ways in which historians and biographers can comically but also dangerously misrepresent the past and the arrogance which comes with philosophical certainty. A funny, wise and salutary novel. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Synopsis
This dazzlingly inventive novel from the bestselling author of Chatterton and Hawksmoor takes a timely look back at our history -- back from 2000 years in the future...Set 2,000 years in the future, Peter Ackroyd's imaginative new novel is by turns lively, inventive and surprising. Plato, the orator, summons the citizens of London on ritual occasions to impart the ancient history of their city. He dwells particularly on the unhappy era of Mouldwarp (AD 1500-2300), which existed before the dimming of the stars and the burning of machines. He lectures upon The Origin of Species by the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens and upon the pantomimic routines of Sigmund Freud. He even provides a glossary of twentieth-century terms, and explains such early myths of creation as 'super-string theory' and 'relativity'. But then something happens. He has a dream, or a vision, or he goes on a real journey -- opinions are divided -- and enters a vast underground cavern, where citizens of Mouldwarp London still live.

When Plato returns with stories of this lost world he is put on trial for corrupting the youth by means of lies and fables, since his words have spread consternation among them. Are their lives part of some greater reality? And, if they learn to doubt, perhaps they will be able to recognise a truth beyond that of their own world. All will depend upon the judgment of Plato by his fellow citizens.