The Lambs of London - Peter Ackroyd

Written by Peter Ackroyd
Read by Alex Jennings
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, [2017] ©2006 BBC America
Length: 6hrs 49min

“A gripping novel set in London that re-imagines an infamous 19th-century Shakespeare forgery.

Charles and Mary Lamb, who will in time achieve lasting fame as the authors of Tales from Shakespeare for Children, are still living at home confined by 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 local bookseller’s son, antiquarian William Ireland, from whom Charles has purchased a book. The ambitious young bookseller claims to possess a ‘lost’ Shakespearean play.

Soon all of London is eagerly anticipating opening night of a star-studded production of the play not knowing that charlatan and a fraud have duped them all.

“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.”.—Publishers Weekly