The Thornwillow Dispatch Box

As an era of electronic books begins, the Thornwillow Dispatch is dedicated to the belief that physical books—tangible, aesthetically pleasing, letterpress printed, and beautifully bound—have a new and evermore important place in our lives: as repositories of permanence in an increasingly ephemeral world of letters. This monthly subscription features the work of celebrated writers—both established greats and dazzling up-and-comers—of fiction and nonfiction, from prose to poetry. The Thornwillow Dispatch is a growing collection of voices commemorating our times for times to come.

Ongoing subscribers to the Thornwillow Dispatch receive a new letterpress-printed, limited-edition short publication from the Press, as well as a curated collection of engraved and letterpress-printed keepsakes and goods for your study. Each month, your Dispatch Box is sure to surprise and delight.

We offer three subscription tiers for the Dispatch that are tailored for a range of collectors, from budding enthusiasts to dedicated veterans of the fine press world.

The October Title
Announcing the next Thornwillow Dispatch

THE OLIGARCH’S SON

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Available for pre-order via subscription to the Thornwillow Dispatch until September 30th, 2026, at 7 pm EST.

Dear Friends of Thornwillow,

Every great city has two faces: The one it presents to the world, and the one that lies beneath the surface.

Few cities appear more magnificent than London. Behind its elegant façades, private clubs, and rituals of respectability, however, lies another world—one shaped by ill-gotten money, ambition, and crime.

In 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler found his way into that world.

Bright, charming, and possessed of an extraordinary talent for self-invention, Zac started posing as the son of a Russian oligarch. Then, in the early hours of November 29, he plunged from the balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames.

What happened in that apartment—and what led to Zac’s death—remains a mystery.

In this remarkable work of investigative journalism, Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac’s parents in their search for answers, uncovering a hidden world of unsavory wealth, deception, and institutional failure beneath the surface of modern London.

It is our great pleasure to present Patrick Radden Keefe’s extraordinary true crime story as the newest volume in the Thornwillow Dispatch.

With highest regards from the press,

Luke Ives Pontifell
Printer & Publisher

Available for pre-order via subscription to the Thornwillow Dispatch until September 30th, 2026, at 7 pm EST.

• Classic Edition: Copies bound in letterpress paper wrappers

• Patrons’ Edition: Volumes featuring deluxe paste paper wrappers*

• Centaur Patrons’ Edition: Hardbound in cloth and decorative paper boards*

Patrons’ and Centaur Patrons’ Editions will also be individually numbered and signed by the author and the publisher.

*Available only to Centaur Patron subscribers to the Thornwillow Dispatch

DISPATCH SUBSCRIBERS

To check on your subscription and past orders, please log in to your account using the links in the top navigation bar.

In November 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler plunged to his death from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. Security cameras captured him alone on the balcony moments before he jumped. But almost everything that led him there remained unexplained.

In the months that followed, Zac’s parents began piecing together a secret life they scarcely knew existed. Their son had been posing as “Zac Ismailov,” the heir to a vast Russian fortune, and had found his way into a strange world of wealthy businessmen, gangsters, expensive apartments, invented identities, and questionable money. The deeper his parents looked, the more troubling the circumstances surrounding his death became—and the more frustrated they grew with the police investigation.

Patrick Radden Keefe takes this mystery as the starting point for a remarkable work of narrative journalism. Following Zac’s parents in their search for the truth, Keefe reconstructs their son’s double life and the extraordinary cast of characters surrounding him. This is a true-crime story that grabs you and doesn’t let go. It is a story of aspiration, deception, and grief in a city known for blending appearance and reality.

Originally published in The New Yorker in 2024, Keefe’s investigation became the foundation for his 2026 book London Falling. The original story, which we are preparing for the next Thornwillow Dispatch, is where it all began.

Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the most acclaimed narrative journalists writing today. A staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has contributed since 2006, he is known for deeply reported stories that use individual lives, crimes, and mysteries to illuminate larger questions of power, corruption, and moral responsibility.

He is the author of London Falling, Rogues, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, The Snakehead, and Chatter. Say Nothing won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and was named by The New York Times as one of the twenty best books of the twenty-first century. Empire of Pain received the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

Keefe’s journalism has also received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and his work has extended into film, television, and audio. He created and hosted the acclaimed podcast Wind of Change and served as an executive producer of the FX adaptation of Say Nothing.

Across his work, Keefe combines the instincts of an investigative reporter with the gifts of a storyteller, transforming painstaking research into narratives that read with the momentum of fiction while remaining firmly rooted in fact.