Hawksmoor — Peter Ackroyd (Penguin)

Description

Peter Ackroyd’s 'Hawksmoor' (1985) intertwines two stories separated by more than two centuries. In eighteenth-century London, the architect Nicholas Dyer is commissioned to build seven churches, concealing dark and occult purposes within their foundations, while in the 1980s Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates a series of murders occurring at the same churches. As the two narratives unfold, their characters, places and events begin to mirror one another, blurring the boundaries between past and present, history and myth. Combining historical fiction, detective mystery and the supernatural, 'Hawksmoor' won both the 1985 Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize.