About this Event
* *Note: $5 registration fee can be used as a credit toward a purchase in-store. The credit expires the night of book club.**
Join us for Book Club!
Sidetrack Bookshop is a mission-driven bookstore, which means (in part) that we are committed to providing a welcoming and inclusive space for people of all identities. In order to maintain our welcoming and inclusive space in the context of what we hope will be a lively and productive book club discussion, we have developed the following house rules.
By attending a book club meeting, you agree to the following:
- Share the floor: Be sure to let everyone talk and express their thoughts on the book. If you feel like you're talking a lot, you probably are! Invite others to speak.
- Be respectful: We'll no doubt have differing opinions. Seek to understand first, then to be understood. Check your privilege, and take special care with others who have lived experience differing from your own.
- Comments or behavior that demean a specific person, identity, or culture will not be tolerated.
Book club hosts will keep these house rules in mind and will redirect you or the conversation as a whole if we feel they aren't being honored. We also reserve the right to ask an attendee to leave if we feel they're contributing to an unwelcome space.
About the Book
From the bestselling, prizewinning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface
“Another blockbuster feat of reportage. . . . I sprinted through this addictive book in three days and gasped more than once at the true story’s twists and turns.”
—Esquire
In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.
In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend for the weekend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: Her son was dead.
In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji and a murderous gangster known as Indian Dave. As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.
In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.
About the Author
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize), and Say Nothing, which received a National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the Twenty Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times Book Review. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award, and the Orwell Prize. He served as an executive producer on the award-winning FX series Say Nothing. He is also the creator and host of the podcast Wind of Change, which The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly named the #1 podcast of 2020.
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