Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. It has been abridged for audio into five broad areas of interest and is also available as a box set. For Ackroyd London is a living organism, with its own laws of growth and change, thus London is a biography rather than a history. It differs from other histories, too, in the range and...
In Venice, Frances Croy is working to leave the previous year behind: another novel published to little success, a scathing review she can't quite manage to forget, and, most of all, the real reason behind her self-imposed exile from London: the incident at the Savoy. Sequestered within an aging palazzo, Frankie finds comfort in the emptiness of Venice in winter, in the absence of others. And then Gilly appears.