From Publishers Weekly
Following up on his recent nonfiction
Shakespeare: The Biography, Ackroyd brings readers forward to London at the turn of the 19th century, and to denizens who are preoccupied with the Shakespearean past. The plot is a lightly fictionalized story about real-life essayist Charles Lamb and his sister Mary, both passionate devotées of the Bard, and their fraught friendship with William Henry Ireland, a bookseller who unearths a trove of Shakespeare documents, including what seems to be an unknown play. The mystery of the play's origin shapes an enchanting, slightly melancholy, exploration of Regency society. The young characters struggle with the constraints of their day—the brilliant, fragile Mary feels suffocated by the strictures of feminine domesticity; William chafes against his father's domination—but they do so without craning their necks toward modernity as an escape route: Ackroyd knows that the past is another country; there his characters live, and there they stay. Steeping readers in revealing but unobtrusive period detail, Ackroyd once again delivers a psychologically rich evocation of a vanished time.
(June 20) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Author of such acclaimed historical novels as
Hawksmoor (1986) and
Chatterton (1988), this British master of the genre carefully weaves another gorgeously textured fictional narrative based in historical fact and on historical figures. The famous late-nineteenth-century English essayist Charles Lamb is the focal point around which Ackroyd tells a stylish, intelligent, and suspenseful tale. Into its major theme, the authenticity of historical documents, he spins a secondary theme of domestic disharmony and eroding personalities behind seemingly ordinary middle-class doors. Charles Lamb is seen here as a young man launched on a writing career but still tethered to his clerk's job at London's East India Company. Another young man, William Ireland (also an actual person), befriends Charles and Charles' frustrated sister, Mary. William Ireland works in his father's antiquarian bookstore, and simultaneous to his stepping into the Lambs' domestic universe, he finds himself the almost accidental owner of a treasure trove of Shakespearean documents, including the text of a lost play. Dissembling is practiced as an art form in this novel, leading the reader on a delicious quest to learn the true story of the Shakespeare manuscripts. Marvelous, sophisticated entertainment, with special appeal for admirers of Henry James' immaculate novella
The Aspern Papers.
Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
