An outstanding debut novel.

This is a masterpiece of imagination supported by a mountain of research.

A novel as crowded, rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.

Some may view this book as a remarkable piece of literary detection, others a dazzlingly written and superbly imagined exposition on how art and writing are gestated and born. Or both.

Astpnishing

It offers a readers experience as immersive as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and as visionary in its capacity to connect us with past lives.

A huge and hugely impressive first novel for both fans of immersive reads and of Dickens’ London.

An impressive debut.

In this astounding first novel, Jarvis re-creates, in loving and exhaustive detail, the writing and publication of Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club...it is a staggering accomplishment, a panoramic perspective of nineteenth-century London and its creative class.

A bravura exercise in fictionalized literary criticism.

You’ll be reluctant to leave its rambunctious world of creative intrigue and betrayal.

Original and very enjoyable… The narrative may be complex but the reading experience is leisurely and pleasant.

It’s a great, rich, swarming, seething broth of a story-behind-a story… You don’t need to be a Dickens nerd like me to be captivated by this epic of ambition and skullduggery.

Richly imaginative,… Jarvis’ first novel represents a major achievement.

A book as crowded and rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.

Brimming with colourful characters, written with tremendous verve and bursting with information... it exuberantly resurrects an age of transition and enthrallingly depicts the pleasures and pressures of creativity.

A vast, sprawling epic, packed with digression and detail, it is a brilliant achievement for a first-time novelist.

The work of a genius

Engrossing detail… Exuberantly broadens out from indictment to celebration… Teems with vividly idiosyncratic characters…. Burstingly informative and thronged with colorful characters, this panoramic novel about the shady start and sunny breakthrough of a literary phenomenon is a phenomenon itself.

Exquisite . . . Martin Stewart's descriptions of Wull's world gripped in winter are brutal and beautiful, his monsters are terrifyingly plausible

Absorbing… Serious without being solemn, sweet without being sickly, it’s an elegant tale about the unexpected places where kindness and sympathy can flourish and deepen.

Kennedy’s comedy is ruthlessly observed – an anti-romance that warms into something moving and profound. It’s also a brilliant portrait of city living.

Two lonely people go about their day in London in this typically Kennedian and utterly wonderful novel… but they find their way towards each other in an agonising love story that’s all about morality and decency in a careless world… Kennedy is a stand-up comedian, and observational comedy runs through this novel in interior monologues that are heartbreakingly familiar and laugh-out-loud sad. Her sentences are some of the best in modern fiction (there’s a springer spaniel called Hector with “black, bewildered ears… [that] made him look as if he’d recently heard dreadful news and still hadn’t adjusted.”) and reading her prose is like eating those fizzy sweets that are both sweet and sour make you wince at the back of your mouth – then go back for more… It’s gorgeous.

Consistently raw and powerful… emotionally exhausting… But there’s a lot to be said for a novel which sets so much store by “affection and tenderness”, and in which the emotional peaks and the possibilities of redemption and renewal are marked by the simple holding of hands.

I love, love, love the Rushdie – I think it’s my favourite of his… The fantasy elements are just magical and, of course, it’s gorgeously written.

An apocalyptic battle between reason and unreason, good and evil, light and darkness, with all the bells and whistles of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Not only a beautifully written satire-as-fairytale but the subject matter is bang on trend… That Rushdie should still be writing so potently and still be continuing to push back the frontiers, when he could easily pull up a deck chair and languish on the frontiers he already owns is wonderful, inspirational and profoundly (but only in the best way) terrifying… 10/10, Master.

Ambitious, smart and dark fable that is full of rich and profound notions about human nature.

I like to think how many readers are going to admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colours, its boisterousness, humour and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit.