Mr Cadmus [Hardcover]

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.

GBPeter Ackroydis an award-winning author of novels includingHawksmoor,ChattertonandThe Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, biographies of Ezra Pound, Blake and Dickens among others, and acclaimed non-fiction bestsellersLondon: The BiographyandThames: Sacred River. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, theGuardianFiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.A darkly playful novel, filled with mystery, revenge, outlandish killings, greed and jealousy, from the multi-award-winning authorPraise 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 elseMr Cadmusis 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 parrotFollows 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 downA novel remarkable for [its] power, ingenuity and subtletyA darkly witty fable ... a tale of vengeance that begins to take on the swerving, lurid velocity of a fever lóB