Dickens (Lives) - Tapa dura

We are setting an 15 August press date for this title, and are set to have high profile, comprehensive reviews in both the national and regional press. Reviews have already appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, and Sunday Times, with further reviews including The Mail on Sunday and The Spectator. Our first early review is in Waterstones Books Quarterly: "Smiley skillfully portrays Dickens' life as it would have been viewed by his contemporaries, his audience and by the subject himself." "Smiley's engaging and often stimulating attempt to penetrate these mysteries approaches Dickens from her own experience as a working novelist.... Smiley pays handsome tribute to him at the end of her book, "He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel - to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way." This is probably what Smiley would most like as her own epitaph." Simon Callow, TheGuardian "Smiley is a wholeheated enthusiast of Dickens." Observer "Her ideathat Dickens prefigured the celebrity life of the late twentieth century is persuasive and is borne out both in his letters and in other accounts of his reading tours... She is at her best when she offers her own insights." Claire

From a bitter and poverty-stricken childhood to a career as the most acclaimed and best loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as full of incident as any of those he created in his novels of life in Victorian England. His well-documented life - the enormous quantity of work, his public readings and his difficult relationships have always made fascinating reading. As a novelist herself, Jane Smiley approaches her subject from a new angle making this biography a must for both aficionados and new recruits. Instead of tracing the events in his life chronologically, she reveals things only as he did - sometimes years after the event. Thus we see him as his contemporaries would have done and get to know him more intimately than ever before. At the same time Smiley offers interpretations of almost all of Dickens' major works showing how 'his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels'.