Product Description

Mary Lamb is confined by the restrictions of domesticity: her father is losing his mind, her mother watchful and hostile. The great solace of her life is her brother Charles, an aspiring writer. It is no surprise when Mary falls for the bookseller's son, antiquarian William Ireland, from whom Charles has purchased a book. But this is no ordinary book - it once belonged to William Shakespeare himself. And William Ireland with his green eyes and his red hair, is no ordinary young man...The Lambs of London brilliantly creates an urban world of scholars and entrepreneurs, a world in which a clever son will stop at nothing to impress his showman father, and no one knows quite what to believe. Ingenious and vividly alive, The Lambs of London is a poignant, gripping novel of betrayal and deceit.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58502 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

The Times
'wonderful novel...masterly. Tender, funny and humane, this is as good as anything he has written'

From the Publisher
'A delicious entertainment... Ackroyd's latest foray into bygone London finds him at the top of his form' Sunday Telegraph

About the Author
Peter Ackroyd lives in London, and has won many prizes for his fiction including including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He is the master of historical fiction (see list opposite marked with asterisk) and the author of biographies of Dickens, Blake and Thomas More and of the bestselling London: The Biography and Illustrated London as well as Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination. He has written and presented TV series on Dickens (2002) and London. (coming in 2004) and was awarded a CBE for services of literature in the 2003 Honours List.

Customer Reviews

Tragically beautiful
I've read several of Ackroyd's novels (and some of his biographies), and whereas most of those are pretty intricate and 'deep' (by lack of a better word) 'The Lambs of London' is in comparison a very easy book. In a very simple but therefore all the more poignant language it tells the tragic story of Mary and Charles Lamb (brother and sister, both feeling trapped and stifled by the life they lead). By pure coincidence Charles buys a book that supposedly once belonged to Shakespeare from the young bookseller William Ireland, and before long the mysterious William will change their lives forever.

Not only these three principal characters but also the novel's minor characters (Charles' and Mary's parents, William's father, ...) are all beautifully depicted, with their (secret) dreams, hopes and desires leading them on until there's no turning back...

I loved it from the first page to the last.

The Lambs of London
I feel bound to offer a counterbalancing opinion to that mooted by Daniel from Bedworth, who did not take to this story of 'Londons [sic] "artistic" [no idea why he put this in quotation marks] community'.

The Lambs of London is a well-crafted novel, interweaving fiction and literary history deftly. It concerns the infamous 'discovery' of Vortigern, one of Shakespeare's lost plays, by William Ireland, a precocious teenage forger, and Ireland's relationship with siblings Charles and Mary Lamb, two amateur Shakespeare scholars. It evokes London at the beginnings of the Romantic period with accuracy and feeling, and, crucially, it sends us back to Shakespeare with rekindled enthusiasm. By no means a two-star novel.

A truly wonderful and magnificent read!

This is the first book I have read by Peter Ackroyd, but will no doubt be the first of many! I could not put this book down - for someone who has a rule of only to read in bed and at bedtime, I found myself trotting through to the bedroom to retrieve it during the day! I found the whole story captivating from the beginning until the very last sentence! I could believe in the characters and the story was woven with feeling, sympathy and much love, though there appeared to be somewhat of an 'open wound' at the end with regard to the tragic figure Mary Lamb, and her adoration of William Ireland. I loved this book so much, I immediately sought out and purchased 'Chatterton' by the same author.