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    Three Brothers
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    Three Brothers
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    Three Brothers
    Audiobook8 hours

    Three Brothers

    Written by Peter Ackroyd

    Narrated by Steven Crossley

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Three Brothers follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel, and Sam Hanway, a trio of brothers born on a postwar council estate in Camden Town. Marked from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world - a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords, of newspaper magnates, backbiters, and petty thieves. From bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed London publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateMar 4, 2014
    ISBN9781629233185
    Unavailable
    Three Brothers
    Author

    Peter Ackroyd

    Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning novelist, as well as a broadcaster, biographer, poet and historian. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers, Thames: Sacred River and London: The Biography, as well as the History of England series. He holds a CBE for services to literature and lives in London.

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    Reviews for Three Brothers

    3.5/5

    31 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      2.5
      Reading this book was akin to being on a roller coaster ride. I was unsure at the beginning, having fun in the middle, and wanting to get the darn thing over with by the end. This is the tale of three London brothers with no affinity with each other or their parents. We are fed their individual stories in separate chapters with very little melding of their lives. There is an attempt to show how they have some connective people in their orbits, but the threads are weak and don't really have much effect on the plot.

      It was a book that left me dissatisfied by the end.
    • 2/5
      Started well and I do enjoy the supernatural blending of history and pre-history with the present. But it failed to bring the localities in London alive - at least to me. And I got tired of the characters, who did not come alive for me either. Had to skim the second half quickly or I would not have finished it. Lovely cover photograph.
    • 5/5
      Three brothers is a novel with a deceptively simple story. While perhaps a tat bland, that simple story could be taken to be the whole story, at a superficial level. Without digging at deeper levels, the story of Three brothers makes for a complete novel, about growing up in London during the second half of the Twentieth Century.The novel tells the story of three brothers who are, as unlikely as it may seem, each born on the 6th of May, in three successuve years, Harry Hanway, May 6, 1947, the middle brother Daniel, May 6, 1948, and the youngest brother, Sam, on May 6, 1949. These dates can be construed by the fact that Harry remembered the approximate day their mother disappeared when he was 10 years old, which must have been in October 1957 (page 18). While few other dates are given, temporal references are provided at which age each of the three boys reach landmark events in their lives. Their father, Philippe Hanway is a failed writer turned nightwatch, and their family is broken up, as it has been deserted by their mother. The disappearance of the mother, Sally, remains a mystery throughout the book, although the youngest brother finds her, and occasionally sees her.The oldest brother becomes a successful journalist, and basically succeeds where his father failed. Daniel, is intellectually talented and wins a scholarship to university in Cambridge, incidentally, the same college of which Peter Ackroyd is an alumnus. The youngest brother, Sam, is adrifter. He apparently has visions or transcendental experiences. Sam is gay, and has an on-off relation with Sparkle or Sparkler, a curious character who is portrayed as a rent boy and a thief.The book is structured in alternating chapters in sequence of the age of the three brothers, Harry, Daniel and Sam, telling the story of the brothers growing up and their lives in London. The novel provides an incredible amount of detail in the names of people, businesses and localities, suggesting that the novel can be read at a deeper level.One of the most eye-catching details is that Harry is engaged as a journalist by The Morning Chronicle. A quick check shows that no such newspaper existed in London during the 1960s, but The Morning Chronicle was a newspaper that was published in London between 1769 and 1865. It is known to have been the first steady employer of Charles Dickens in the capacity as a journalist. Before that, Harry took up a position as a messenger boy at The Camden Bugle. This periodical still exists: it is published by the Camden Mental Health Consortium, a charity aiming to improve the quality of life of mental health patients and former patients in the London Borough of Camden.The clue leading to The Morning Chronicle is sufficiently obscure to suggest that 1950s - 1970s London is, to contemporary readers already as obscure as the Victorian London of Charles Dickens. The novel Three brothers is apparently decked out in a myriad of fine details that wait to be explored. It is likely that these details provide several layers of meaning to the novel, as characters can be identified with historical characters and people, and locations can provide depth and dimensions to characters that cannot be gleaned from superficial reading.However, the question will be, who is sufficiently interested to do so? Certainly not the casual reader. Probably, Three brothers will be a tough task for several PhD candidates to unravel. The Internet seems un indispensable tool for that purpose, but it is likely that very obscure or distorted and fictionalized facts cannot be found with such a crude tool. Professional readers will have to devote themselves to delving into the life of the author, who is known to have a life-long obsession with London, Ackroyd being the author of London: The Biography. It could be argued that in Three brothers the city of London assumes the role of the central character.Fortunately, reading the novel at the apparently superficial level is also a rewarding reading experience.
    • 4/5
      Peter Ackroyd must be one of the most prolific writers around at the moment. he has written a host of literary biographies, several books about London, a score of novels and he is currently writing a multi-volume series on the History of England. Where does he find the time? If this novel is anything to go by, he isn't sacrificing quality in favour of quantity.Though I enjoyed "Hawksmoor" and "Chatterton" more than twenty years ago, I have struggled with many of his previous novels. However, having read some favourable reviews in the literary press I decided to have a punt on this one, and was certainly rewarded. No prizes for guessing that it tells the story of three brothers, though interesting all three are born at the same time on the same date in three successive years, though this does not serve to render them particularly close. While they are still very young their mother just disappears, leaving them to be brought up by their laconic father, Philip who, as a novelist manque, drifts through life working for years as a night watchman before becoming a long distance lorry driver. The three boys follow different paths at school. Harry, the eldest, is a popular and capable boy, who leaves to take up a post as messenger for the local newspaper, and being a n opportunist, gradually works his way up to become a reporter. Daniel, the middle of the three, is an academic prodigy who works hard and secures a scholarship to Cambridge where he stays on to complete postgraduate courses before becoming a Fellow of his college. Sam, the youngest, just drifts through life, largely disengaged from the world around him.Although the three boys go along completely different paths, their lives prove to be connected through a network of mutual friends and colleagues, and Ackroyd weaves a sinuous web of skullduggery, corruption, blackmail and violece, set against the shifting political context of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.Very engaging!
    • 3/5
      Three Brothers gives a picture of London which while it may be true to the period of the novel, is also very Dickensian. This feature derives from both the geographical description and the characterisation.The Church of Our Lady of Sorrows crops up often and I felt that I ought to check whether it really existed. It doesn't although the Catholic church in Camden Town is called Our Lady of Hal reflecting a link to a town in Belgium which is a centre for Marian devotion. Crystal Street no longer exists if it ever did but Britannia Street certainly still does not far from Kings' Cross Station.Characters such as Sparkler could be lifted straight from a Dickens novel.I found that the tale of the Boy who Turned into a Tree told by Asher to Sam is a central myth in the story. It reflects a mother's love for her child and this is in turn reflected in the fact that it is Sam who finds his mother again and develops an adult relationship with her. Perhaps there is some significance in that which links to the future of each of the three brothers.Sam, the youngest of the three brothers and the one who more like his father, seems to be the key brother in the story although there is more obviously written about the lives of the other two Daniel and Harry. However each of them has a mystical/supernatural quality and either hears things which others don't hear, or sees things which others don't see. Sam is the best example of this as he sees the statue of the Virgin Mary in the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows weeping.I enjoyed this novel - the first of Ackroyd's fiction works I have read.
    • 3/5
      Peter Ackroyd's fascination with London borders on the obsessive. The larger part of his eclectic and prolific output is haunted by the city, and particularly by a quasi-mystical sense - shared by other authors, particularly Iain Sinclair - that every place has an underlying character that survives societal and topographical changes. Ackroyd has been the city's chronicler in his magnum opus - London: The Biography - and its sequels Thames: Sacred River, London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets and the upcoming Queer London. The city provides the backdrop to several of his biographies (for instance the volumes dedicated to Dickens and Wilkie Collins). In his fiction, it not only serves as a setting but is treated almost as another protagonist, equal to the living characters.Ackroyd's latest novel, Three Brothers, in some ways sums up concerns found in several of Ackroyd's earlier London books. The siblings of the title were, like the author, born and brought up in post-World War II London in (it is suggested) a Catholic household. It is indeed tempting to read their intertwined life stories as a sort of fictional autobiography - particularly in the case of Daniel, the shy literature graduate turned author/critic who slowly comes to terms with his homosexuality.I read this novel, quite appropriately, over a two-day visit to London. It certainly gripped me. Yet, it felt strangely slight, and I suspect that it is not a book which will stay long with me. Part of its problem is that it tries to be too many things at the same time. At its heart it is a realist novel, which depicts the tough day-to-day life in the years after the war. This realism is reflected in the matter-of-fact third person narrative - detached to the point of blandness. Yet, true to Ackroyd's "psychogeographical" outlook, the plot is driven by remarkable coincidences and by the strange visions of the past experienced by the youngest brother Sam. This technique is not new - Ackroyd himself has used it in Hawksmoor and, a similar approach (translated to Prague) is found in Miloš Urban 's The Seven Churches. Yet, whereas this supernatural element fits those novels' Gothic atmosphere like a glove, here it just feels out of place.Other elements jostle for the readers' attention. There's a hint of satire of the journalistic world which is vaguely reminiscent of Waugh (although good old Evelyn is much funnier), there is a nod to thriller and crime fiction. At one point there's even a cameo for a poltergeist, which causes a couple of pages of mischief before being dispensed with completely. I tend to like genre-bending fiction, but I ultimately felt that there was too much going on for a novel a mere couple of hundred pages long.