The Plato Papers - by Peter Ackroyd (Paperback)

About the Book

At the turn of the 38th century, London's greatest orator, Plato, focuses on the obscure and confusing era that began in A.D. 1500, the Age of Mouldwarp. His subjects include Charles Darwin's greatest novel, "The Origin of Species", and he explores the rituals of Mouldwarp and the later cult of webs and nets that enslaved the population.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Richly revealing. . . . Unlike anything else Peter Ackroyd has written. . . . A jeu d'esprit."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A lively tale and an invigorating meditation on the changelessness, after no matter how many eons, of human nature."
--Time

"A serious divertissement, a brilliant fabulation that is the product of a playful, engaged, and well-stocked mind."
--The Boston Globe

"A little book that raises some big questions. . . . You can finish it in a couple of hours. But if you read it carefully, you'll be thinking about it for days."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Peter Ackroyd is a visionary, as The Plato Papers makes clear. This is one of the oddest but most important and original novels to appear in many years. This masterpiece of contemporary writing will thrill and entertain readers for years to come, but it will do more than that: it will enlarge their vision, stimulating organs long forgotten and never known."
--Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Robert Frost: A Life

"What makes The Plato Papers notable is not its fantastic invention but its intelligence...Excellently written...with a truly Socratic curiosity, making The Plato Papers a philosophical good read."
--Malcolm Bradbury, Financial Times

"An invigorating mixture of satire, history, philosophy, morality, and linguistic investigation...it's like T.S. Eliot on speed meets Martian poetry but with better jokes."
--Michele Robert, The Times

"Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite. It simultaneously deconstructs the story of the past and builds its own myth. In short, this is a carefully pulsed breath of a book, with an impact that sneaks into one's dreams."
--John Clute, The Independent

"A fantastic invention--excellently written."--Malcolm Bradbury

About the Author

Peter Ackroyd is a bestselling writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books include the biographies Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More and the novels The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, Milton in America, and The Plato Papers. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award (jointly), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Guardian fiction prize. He lives in London.