Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton was first published in England to tremendous acclaim; it was both a #1 best-seller and was short-listed for the Booker Prize shortly after its publication. A thoroughly contemporary novel, though with fascinating side trips into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Chatterton has also amazed and entertained American readers. Thomas Chatterton (17521770),apparently a suicide at 18, posthumously astonished literary England when he was revealed as the author of a sequence of famous and influential “medieval” poems he claimed to have discovered. An authentic talent as well as a literary counterfeiter, he is the guiding spirit of Peter Ackroyd’s brilliant novel. In today’s London, a young poet and an elderly female novelist engage the mystery of Chatterton by trying to decode the clues found in an old manuscript, only to discover that their investigation discloses other riddles for which there are no solutions. They are not alone in their quest: the mystery is also being revived in an earlier age, as in the mid-nineteenth century Henry Wallis paints his celebrated portrait of Chatterton lying dead in an attic room. Then young Chatterton himself, an originator and inspiration of the Romantic Movement, steps forward with the surprising story of his final days. Chatterton is at once a hilariously witty comedy; a thoughtful and dramatic exploration of the deepest issues of authenticity in both life and art; and a subtle and touching story of failed lives, parental love, doomed marriages, and erotic passions.
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