The mastermind of narrative reporting who brought us Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe delves into the mysterious death of a teenager and his family’s search for truth in London Falling.
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“After Zac Brettler mysteriously plummeted into the Thames, his grieving parents discovered that he’d been posing as an oligarch’s son. Would the police help them solve the puzzle of his death?” So begins Radden Keefe’s gripping New Yorker piece, A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld, which was published on February 5, 2024, and is now the basis for his new book, London Falling.
As Ravi Mirchandani, editor-in-chief of Picador, says, Radden Keefe will “investigate what brought Zac Brettler, businessman Akbar Shamji, and London gangster Dave Sharma together that night and will show that the UK capital, the city of great architecture, open spaces and history, can suddenly turn malignant and dangerous, a place that has been fully hijacked by property speculation, insidious corruption, mercenary realpolitik, and the culture of bling.”
Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter.
Patrick started contributing to The New Yorker in 2006. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014. Say Nothing received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was selected by the New York Times as one of the “20 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Empire of Pain was awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year.
He is also the writer and host of Wind of Change, an 8-part podcast, which investigates the strange convergence of espionage and heavy metal music during the Cold War, and was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly.
Patrick grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts and went to college at Columbia. He received masters degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, and a law degree from Yale. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
