The Plato Papers: A Novel - Peter Ackroyd

From the imagination of one of the most brilliant writers of our time and bestselling author of The Life of Thomas More, a novel that playfully imagines how the "modern" era might appear to a thinker seventeen centuries hence.

At the turn of the 38th century, London’s greatest orator, Plato, is known for his lectures on the long, tumultuous history of his now tranquil city. Plato focuses on the obscure and confusing era that began in A.D. 1500, the Age of Mouldwarp. His subjects include Sigmund Freud’s comic masterpiece "Jokes and Their Relation to the Subconscious," and Charles D.’s greatest novel, "The Origin of Species." He explores the rituals of Mouldwarp, and the later cult of webs and nets that enslaved the population. By the end of his lecture series, however, Plato has been drawn closer to the subject of his fascination than he could ever have anticipated. At once funny and erudite, The Plato Papers is a smart and entertaining look at how the future is imagined, the present absorbed, and the past misrepresented.

PRAISE
"Funny–insightful–scintillating." – NOW

"A marvellous fable for our times…funny, wise and strange…. Ackroyd has written what we always knew that he alone of his generation could produce: a timeless literary masterpiece." – A.N. Wilson

"Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite…a carefully-pulsed breath of a book with an impact that sneaks into one’s dreams." – Independent

"The pervasive presence of a London transformed by the mythical and magical possibilities of its distant past and its imagined future is one of the attractions [of The Plato Papers]." – TLS