Margins
London Falling book cover
London Falling
A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth
2026
First Published
4.66
Average Rating
615
Number of Pages

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 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 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.

Avg Rating
4.66
Number of Ratings
133
5 STARS
71%
4 STARS
24%
3 STARS
4%
2 STARS
1%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe
Author · 6 books
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Review of Books. He received the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, for his story "A Loaded Gun," was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and is also the recipient of an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at the New America Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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