Thames: Sacred River

Oct 17, 2024 7:23 AM

Author:Peter Ackroyd

Just as Peter Ackroyd's bestselling London is the biography of the city, Thames: Sacred River is the biography of the river, from sea to source. Exploring its history from prehistoric times to the present day, the reader is drawn into an extraordinary world, learning about the fishes that swim in the river and the boats that ply its surface; about floods and tides; hauntings and suicides; miasmas and malaria; locks, weirs and embankments; bridges, docks and palaces.

Peter Ackroyd has a genius for digging out the most surprising and entertaining details, and for writing about them in the most magisterial prose; the result is a wonderfully readable and captivating guide to this extraordinary river and the towns and villages which line it.

Reviews

As rich and meandering and wonderful as its subject, this is one of the books of the year

—— Sunday Times

Mesmerising... No one is better than Ackroyd at evoking the texture and atmosphere of the distant past... Ackroyd's gift is to write history in the idiom of a poet. As soon as you open this account of the Thames, you will want to immerse yourself in it

—— Daily Telegraph

A beautifully produced book... There is so much to enjoy here

—— Gillian Tindall , Sunday Telegraph

Wonderful. He is comprehensive - everything from mammoths to the Dome is here - but he is also playful and eccentric, so that reading this book is like being in a boat on the river itself... Peter Ackroyd's writing is such a pleasure that Thames: Sacred River can be read all at once, with increasing delight, and afterwards dipped into, like stretches of the great waterway it charts and celebrates

—— Jeanette Winterson , Financial Times

A very enjoyable and highly idiosyncratic account of the subject

—— Spectator

His exhaustive reclaiming of the Thames inks in colourful new detail

—— Time

A handsome book... hours of contentment for the armchair boatman...the range of information is impressive

—— Irish Times

Ackroyd is a great visionary, able to concertina the present into the past, and vice versa

—— Craig Brown , Mail on Sunday

An imaginative history of the river with an eclectic cast

—— Daily Telegraph

It seems the most perfect gift

—— Annable Croft , Daily Express

Fascinating, gossipy and occasionally hilarious

—— Jeffrey Taylor , Express

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