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Heinrich Obermann, a celebrated German archaeologist, has uncovered the ancient ruins of Troy on a Turkish hillside. He fervently believes that his discovery will prove that the heroes of the Iliad, a work he has cherished all his life, actually existed. Sophia, Obermann’s young Greek wife, works at the site carefully preserving the ancient treasures she uncovers. But Sophia soon comes to see another side of her husband. He is mysteriously vague about his past and the wife he claims died years before. When she finds a cache of artefacts Obermann has hidden away, her suspicions about him rise, feelings that escalate when a visiting archaeologist who questions Obermann’s methods dies from a mysterious fever. The arrival of a second, equally skeptical archaeologist brings Sophia’s doubts to a head—and spurs Obermann to make even greater claims about the evidence he has found and the profound importance of his achievements.
"[A] book's worth of calculation is undone at the end when Ackroyd raises hallowed dust, but clouds the issues at hand." - PW.
"This is Ackroyd’s most exuberant novel for years…" - Daily Mail (UK).
"Provoking, unsettling, ingenious—and a delight to read." - The Guardian (UK).
"Written in clipped, precise, instantly recognizable prose, The Fall of Troy is a novel about opposites—of truth and deception, fact and fiction, history and romance, love and loyalty.…But however you read The Fall of Troy—as a love story and mystery told in Homeric style, or as a deeper meditation on the relationship between reality and imagination—Ackroyd the novelist re-emerges triumphantly from the mud of his excavations." - The Times (UK).
"[T]he novel pushes too many envelopes too far, concluding in a very nearly ludicrous farrago of shocking revelations, narrow escapes and what even Obermann's critics might identify as divine judgment." - Kirkus Reviews.
This information about The Fall of Troy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo © Charles Hopkinson
Novelist, biographer, and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London on October 5, 1949.
He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, and studied at Yale University as a Mellon Fellow, where he completed Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism, published in 1976. On his return from Yale, he worked for The Spectator magazine in London as literary editor (1973-7), then as joint managing editor (1978-82) and film critic. He is chief book reviewer for The Times newspaper and a regular broadcaster on radio. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1984.
Equally acclaimed for both his inventive biographies and his formally diverse fiction, Ackroyd blends past and present, fact and fiction in his writing.
He also displays a genius for literary impersonation, both in his ...
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Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
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