![]() ![]() With his last novel, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, ‘as gripping and ingenious a murder mystery as you could hope to come across,’ in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, he reached a whole new level of critical and popular success. ![]() When Peter Ackroyd, one of Britain’s undisputed literary masters, writes a new novel, it is a literary event. All is masterfully woven into an immensely engaging and entertaining novel, a suspenseful reflection on life, nature, and the cosmos, and above all an illuminating and enchanting story. ![]() And Joey Hanover, a retired music hall and TV entertainer searching for his own past, has learned secrets from Farmer Mint and his son, Boy, the weirdly cryptic guardians of their ancestral home in the valley. Meanwhile, at the nearby observatory, astronomer Damien Fall, his telescope focused on the red star Aldebaran, is unnerved by the deeper significance he imputes to the celestial sophistication of the region’s ancient inhabitants. Someone or something is trying to sabotage the best efforts of the excavators, headed by Mark Clare, to unearth the dormant secrets of the burial ground. A group of eccentrics archaeologists, astronomers, local rustics, a civil servant, and a stand up comic converge on the site, disturbing the quiet seclusion of Pilgrin Valley. ![]() First Light begins with an ominous coincidence: the reappearance of the ancient night sky during the excavation of an astronomically aligned Neolithic grave in Dorset. ![]()
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