ABOUT THE BOOK

Set 2,000 years in the future, Peter Ackroyd's imaginative new novel is by turns lively, inventive and surprising. Plato, the orator, summons the citizens of London on ritual occasions to impart the ancient history of their city. He dwells particularly on the unhappy era of Mouldwarp (AD 1500 - 2300), which existed before the dimming of the stars and the burning of the machines. He lectures upon The Origin of Species by the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens and upon the pantomimic routines of Sigmund Freud. He even provides a glossary of twentieth-century terms, and explains such early myths of creation as 'super-string theory' and 'relativity'.

But then something happens. He has a dream, or a vision, or he goes on a real journey - opinions are divided - and enters a vast underground cavern, where citizens of Mouldwarp London still live. When Plato returns with stories of this lost world he is put on trial for corrupting the youth by means of lies and fables, since his words have spread consternation among them. Are their lives part of some greater reality? And, if they learn to doubt, perhaps they will be able to recognise a truth beyond that of their own world. All will depend upon the judgement of Plato by his fellow citizens.

Peter Ackroyd's most recent books include bestselling biographies of Dickens (1990), Blake (1995) and Thomas More (1998), and the novels 'Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem' (1994) and 'Milton in America' (1996). He is the winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Biography and the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in London.