Staff Pick
London Falling
A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City, and a Family's Search for Truth
by Patrick Radden Keefe
AUCK IN STOCK
WGTN IN STOCK
Pages:
400
Published:
Apr 2026
Format
Trade Paperback
Publisher
Pan Macmillan
Imprint
Picador
ISBN:
9781035056293
'From the Baillie Gifford Prize-winning and Sunday Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing comes a stunning story of wealth, violence and deceit at the heart of a glittering city.
'A new book by Keefe means drop everything and close the blinds; you'll be turning pages for hours' Los Angeles Times
'Patrick Radden Keefe [is] one of the top narrative nonfiction authors of his generation' TIMEIn 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac's parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night - and how a teenager's world of make-believe drew him into the city's terrifying underworld.London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.'
'A new book by Keefe means drop everything and close the blinds; you'll be turning pages for hours' Los Angeles Times
'Patrick Radden Keefe [is] one of the top narrative nonfiction authors of his generation' TIMEIn 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac's parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night - and how a teenager's world of make-believe drew him into the city's terrifying underworld.London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.'
$40.00
This book had me in a chokehold for its entire duration. I couldn't go to work or the shops or chop vegetables or sit on the john without thinking about it and wishing I was reading it instead. A fascinating dive into London's criminal underbelly, European history, the English Justice system, humanities proclivity for lies, and so much more. Like nothing else.
Eden, Unity Books wellington
