Is London Really Falling? Patrick Radden Keefe's Search for Truth in the Most Invisible of Cities

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody, it's Thursday, the 25th of June, 2026, been another traumatic week in the United Kingdom. Another change of PM, Stammer's gone. Looks like Andy Burnham's gonna take over. New York Times describes is at a terrible inheritance. Why can't Britain hold on to prime ministers?
CNN asks, it's the economy. The economy, of course, in the UK, is particularly bad. Still deep in the shadow of Brexit and many other things. One man who knows a great deal about the United Kingdom is my guest today, Patrick Radden Keefe. He was a graduate student at LSE many years ago, and his new book, London Falling, A Mysterious Death of a Gilded City in a Family Search for Truth, has done extremely well. It's the number one New York Times best selling book. It's a portrait, at least according to The New Republic, of a crisis-ridden country. So I'm thrilled that Patrick is joining us. Patrick, do you see this book, which has got a great deal of press? I know you're a bit podcasted out, so hopefully this would be a slightly different subject from the way you usually talk on podcasts. Is this a book about the crisis of the UK? Of course, there have been so many crises.

**Patrick Radden Keefe** (1:58)
I don't really think of it that way, no. I mean, I do think that there is, I think part of the reaction to the book, part of the reason that it has resonated the way that it currently is with British readers, is a sense of malaise about the direction that everything is taking. But that was not the spirit in which I wrote the book. I was in the first instance very drawn to, on the one hand, this kind of quite intimate story of a family who loses a child.
And then I guess more broadly, the history of London itself, so London as distinct from the UK at large. I mean, I was sort of interested in the way in which this city, which I know quite well and love very much, has changed in recent decades.

**Andrew Keen** (2:48)
A few months ago, we had Andrew O'Hagan on the show. His novel, Caledonian Road, in some ways, I'm sure you're familiar with the book, covers the same ground as your book, except it's fiction, whereas yours is nonfiction. But it does have, in the way you treat the narrative, Patrick, it reads, I don't know whether this is again, somewhat of a cliche, but it reads a little bit like a novel, doesn't it?

**Patrick Radden Keefe** (3:17)
Yeah. I think to some degree, that's probably by design. I am very aware when I sit down to write, particularly these days, that everybody has a phone in their pocket that is making claims on their attention.
I've always been drawn to stories that are stories, even if they're true stories, that are stories about people. And so I am absolutely looking for a story that is inherently dramatic and that I can tell in hopefully a seductive enough manner that I can engage somebody who might not otherwise be a big reader, somebody who, you know, reads many books or reads nonfiction books or would be drawn to other elements of whatever the inquiry in question is. I think narrative remains a pretty unbeatable delivery device for information.

**Andrew Keen** (4:15)
You were on the show a few years ago talking about Empire of Pain, your bestselling book about the secret history of the Sackler dynasty, which of course has had a terrible tragic impact on the United States. This book is a much more, as you say, a private tragedy, the tragedy of the Brettler family who, as it happens, I grew up with in London, so I know them privately.
I remember when your original article came out in the New Yorker. Of course, I read it because I like your work plus I know the Brettlers. I wondered whether you were going to turn it into a book. When I heard you were going to turn it into a book, I thought, well, is there a book there? I wasn't sure, then I read it, and of course, there is one. But did you have those questions? You must have had in terms of writing this article, which was a long article for The New Yorker, what was it about? 15, 20,000 words?

**Patrick Radden Keefe** (5:13)
It was 15,000, yeah.

**Andrew Keen** (5:16)
Did you, I'm assuming you tussled with whether or not you should or could turn it into a book?

**Patrick Radden Keefe** (5:24)