Mr Cadmus

by Peter Ackroyd

Overview

Two apparently harmless women reside in cottages one building apart in the idyllic English village of Little Camborne. Miss Finch and Miss Swallow, cousins, have put their pasts behind them and settled into conventional country life. But when a mysterious foreigner, Theodore Cadmus - from a Mediterranean island nobody has heard of - moves into the middle cottage, the safe monotony of their lives is shattered.

Soon, long-hidden secrets and long-held grudges threaten to surface, drawing all into a vortex of subterfuge, theft, violence, mayhem . . . and murder.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786898975
Publisher:	Canongate Books
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Edition description:	Main
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning author of novels including Hawksmoor, Chatterton and The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, biographies of Ezra Pound, Blake and Dickens among others, and acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography and Thames: Sacred River. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Peter Ackroyd: Extraordinary, amazing, vivid, convincing. [Ackroyd's] view of life questions the role not just of the novel but of art and history, memory, time and much else

Financial Times

Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed

Independent on Sunday

Mr Cadmus is a treat of a tale. To a "polite" English village add a sprinkling of sinister. The result? Cosy and twisted, comic and gothic, with a show-stealing parrot

JESS KIDD

Follows the mysterious Mr Cadmus who hails from a Mediterranean island nobody has heard of and turns life in the idyllic English village of Little Camborne upside down

Best books to look out for The Times

A novel remarkable for [its] power, ingenuity and subtlety

London Review of Books

Murderous intrigue plays out against a backdrop of curtain-twitching small-town banality in this playful black comedy

Sunday Times

A darkly witty fable ... a tale of vengeance that begins to take on the swerving, lurid velocity of a fever dream

Spectator

Blackly comic . . . as the body count mounts, Ackroyd's novel moves beyond Midsomer Murders territory and into the realm of the truly weird

Daily Mail

Cousins Maud Finch and Millicent Swallow’s quiet, routine retirement is disrupted when Theodore Cadmus, a mysterious foreigner, moves into their close-knit Devonshire village. Narrator Jilly Bond performs this audiobook, which moves from charming to dark to over the top as Theo’s intentions and motivations for moving to England become clear. Bond nicely presents the humorous moments, and her characterizations of the women are fitting, capturing their different demeanors. She is less successful, however, when voicing Theo, using a vague accent and exaggerated expression. The story provides the backgrounds of the three main characters—some of it traumatic—but doesn’t fully tie the information into their present circumstances or fully explain Theo’s behavior toward the women. Bond’s narration cannot save the loose plotting or unclear ending. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile