London Falling : A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

Another incredible work of investigative reporting from the award-winning author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, London Falling unpeels the astonishing true story of a teenager who mysteriously fell to his death from a Thames-side luxury apartment and was later discovered to have been posing as the son of a Russian oligarch.

From the Baillie Gifford Prize-winning and Sunday 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.

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.

MEDIA REVIEWS

Gripping, rigorous and smart, London Falling takes a terrible mystery with an extraordinary cast of characters and somehow manages to make it perfectly encapsulate the weirdness of how London has mutated these past decades . . . breathtaking - Jon Ronson

[Keefe] has a real gift for storytelling, an ability to unfurl the narrative in a way that is completely engrossing - Louis Theroux

I've barely left the house since starting Patrick Radden Keefe’s superbly gripping London Falling . . . it will become a defining book of our time - Johanna Thomas-Corr, chief literary critic, The Times and Sunday Times

He is a master — perhaps even the master — of the non-fiction narrative, and has an enviable knack for telling complicated stories with perfect clarity - Craig Brown, The Sunday Times

A compulsive tale of money, lies and avoidable tragedy . . . a scrupulously researched work of narrative nonfiction . . . London Falling, grimly absorbing from start to finish, opens a window on to a world of financial dirty work and Walter Mitty-like fantasies of aspirational wealth - Ian Thomson, The Guardian

Magnificent . . . London Falling is partly – and brilliantly – about the way London affects its young, forcing them to grow up so fast within sight of corruption . . . riveting and powerful . . . [Keefe] has a dramatist’s gift for structure and a novelist’s fascination with human character and motive . . . [An] enthralling masterpiece, by one of the world’s great non-fiction writers - Laura Cumming, Observer

Engrossing . . . In deftly unpicking [the story], Keefe makes it terrifyingly clear what dangerous company Zac had got himself into . . . rigorous and thoughtful - James Walton, The Telegraph

Fortunately for him and his family, Zac Brettler came the way of one of the finest, and most famous, magazine writers in the English-speaking world, Patrick Radden Keefe . . . When Keefe flies into Heathrow, he comes to knock on the conscience of a nation . . . such a richly plotted maze, as twisting and interconnected as a nervous system . . . full of such extraordinarily rich scenes - Nicholas Harris, New Statesman

London Falling is a parable of a 21st-century global city’s moral decay . . . I was intrigued by whether an American writer could capture the nuances of the city’s metamorphosis. Keefe does so admirably . . . Through masterful narration and exhaustive research, Keefe leaves the reader with little doubt as to why Brettler jumped - Edward Luce, Financial Times