Ashleigh Prosser

Peter Ackroyd’s latest work of fiction, Three Brothers, is his fifteenth novel and his fifty-fourth book since he began publishing almost forty years ago. Since the late 1970s, Ackroyd has steadily produced a substantial collection of award-winning work as a poet, novelist, historian, biographer, journalist and critic. Awarded a CBE for services to literature in 2003, Ackroyd is one of London’s most well-known intellectuals. As an internationally bestselling author, popular historian and recognisable radio and television personality, he has gained both the literary recognition and the public status of a cultural iconoclast in Britain. His reputation as one of England’s pre-eminent ‘cultural gatekeepers’ (perhaps self-appointed, but nevertheless apt) is all the more pertinent, for what is most distinctive in Ackroyd’s writing (besides his flair for hyperbole) is his focus on the obscure and the infamous in England’s social and cultural history, particularly in the dark past of its capital city London – his Muse and life-long home. His newest novel is no exception. Three Brothers tells the tale of brothers Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway, who start their lives on the same day one year apart on a post-war council estate in Camden Town in the middle of the last century. Abandoned by their mother, who simply disappears one day, and neglected by their father, a night-watchman and failed writer exhausted by living, each brother is left to find his own way through life in swarming, shadowy 1960s London...