London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City, and a Familys Search for Truth

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From the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing - a stunning story of corruption and tragedy in one of the world's great cities: London. "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' TIME In 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.

Author Bio

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (now streaming on Disney+), and two previous critically-acclaimed books, The Snakehead, and Chatter. He is the writer and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, which The Guardian named the #1 podcast of 2020. He is the recipient of the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He grew up in Boston and now lives in New York.