The Clerkenwell Tales - Hardcover

"The Clerkenwell Tales is a truly extraordinary feat of historical imagination: a slim novel, straining at the seams with a sort of macabre relish, in which disgust and enthusiasm jostle."
--The Sunday Telegraph

"A gripping thriller which also happens to be wonderfully full of engaging historical detail and conversation-enhancing words like 'hopharlot.'" --Literary Review

"[The Clerkenwell Tales] is a pacy novel brimming with Ackroyd's imaginative use of scholarship. This is more than a reworking of earlier material, be it Chaucer's or his own. Ackroyd is clearly out to impress, and it's worked." --The Daily Telegraph

"Historical fiction of the utmost potency." --The Daily Mail

"Ackroyd's 'colour' is so curious, so rich and so variegated that there is something in almost every sentence to sharpen one's sense of late 14th-century London as squirmingly alive--and extremely pungent . . . a cunning little intrigue." --The Spectator

"Ackroyd's learning is as impressive as his imagination . . . Like Chaucer, Ackroyd sees literature and history as part of the same tradition. --The Observer

"The Clerkenwell Tales is a tour-de-force, full of rich imaginings and strange happenings. It is as finely wrought as an illuminated manuscript." --The Scotsman