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

In 2019, teenager Zac Brettler mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury London apartment building on the Thames. Afterwards, his grieving parents discovered that Zac had been leading a fantasy life as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. The reliably brilliant, Baillie Gifford-winning author of Empire of Pain, and the recently dramatised Say Nothing investigates what happened, in this “indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces”, which also considers what it is to live a lie. Heavily embargoed, what I have been able to read so far is both riveting and horrifying.