BOOK REVIEW: LONDON FALLING By Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador 2026)
It's rare for me to pick up a book of non-fiction that has nothing to do with literature, past or present. But Patrick Radden Keefe's LONDON FALLING has been the book that everyone has been talking about in London these past few months. People recommended it as chilling and terrifying, and I was reluctant to pick it up, not quite knowing what it would reveal. It was a book that became hard to miss, turning up everywhere on the tube, piled in bookshop windows, dog-eared on café tables. So eventually I caved and decided to find out what all the fuss was about.
What I hadn't quite reckoned with was how far the story would pull me in. LONDON FALLING is a sad, dark tale of the underbelly of a city. In November 2019, a nineteen-year-old named Zac Brettler stepped onto the balcony of a riverside apartment block on the Thames and fell five floors to his death. Radden Keefe goes behind that single, terrible event to work out what led a young man there on that dark November night, and who or what might have been responsible.
To understand the fall, you first have to understand who Zac was before it. He came from a comfortable, upper-middle-class family in North London. His life was a familiar one of good schools, steady careers, hardworking and loving parents keen to give their two sons every opportunity. But unlike his elder brother, Zac didn't get into the top North London private schools, and it's here, Radden Keefe suggests, that his story begins to spiral. He ended up instead at a school thick with the children of Russian oligarchs, something London has no shortage of, and amid the flashy cars and designer goods, something in him started to fracture. He didn't want to be near that life; he wanted to own that life. He wanted to be an oligarch's son, heir to a great fortune, living in a penthouse with a view of the river.
It’s this wanting that made him easy prey. After school, instead of university, Zac told his parents he was going into business with "certain contacts." In reality, he had begun spinning a fiction, that he was the son of a Russian oligarch, sitting on a freshly inherited fortune, and it was that fiction that opened the door to Akbar Shamji, a polished Cambridge graduate living the high life in London, who took Zac under his wing on the understanding that the money was real. Shamji in turn introduced him to a far more unsettling figure, Verinder "Dave" Sharma. Between these new shifty alliances, something closer to a liars' club took shape. Zac kept spinning the yarn to keep pace with men who wanted his imaginary inheritance more than they wanted him.
It's this last point that gives the book its chilling intrigue. LONDON FALLING isn't only the story of one troubled teenager pulled into the city's underworld beneath a glittering, polished surface, it's a portrait of a city changing fast, unmoored by the internet, social media, and the sheer velocity of money passing through it, where increasingly no one is quite who they claim to be to the extent that even parents don’t know their own child. It reads, at moments, as almost Dickensian in its darkness, but restaged for the digital age and Radden Keefe, who made his name doing exactly this kind of excavation in SAY NOTHING and EMPIRE OF PAIN, writes non-fiction with the ease and shape of a novel, which is what makes it so hard to put down and so easy to feel changed by.
I'd only recommend this book to readers with a strong disposition, it earns its reputation for being unsettling, precisely because none of it is invented. It will make you think about whether we really know each other at all.
LONDON FALLING By Patrick Redden Keefe (Picador, 2026)