Penguin Books Australia

Winner of the NCR Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

'This is the story of someone who - almost - wasn't there; who vanished into thin air. Her names, dates, family and experiences very nearly disappeared from the record for good . . .'

'Immaculately well done. Tomalin has managed to unearth a wealth of material about the uncharted life of Samuel Pepys'  Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

'Sex, drink, plague, fire, music, marital conflict, the fall of kings, corruption and courage in public life, wars, navies, public execution, incarceration in the Tower: Samuel Pepys's life is full of irresistible material, and Claire Tomalin seizes...

'A perfect biography: detailed, witty, warm. Tomalin involves us so deeply that Austen's final illness and death come almost as a personal tragedy to the reader'  Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

'Truly marvellous. I cannot think that a better life of Jane Austen then Claire Tomalin's will be written for many years. Her readings of the novels are full of brilliant insights. She...

'An extraordinary story, beautifully told. Tomalin is the most empathetic of biographers'  Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class...

'Intelligent, finely made and wonderfully readable. As gripping as the best fiction'  Independent on Sunday

'One of the best biographies I have ever read: a perfect match of author and subject. It should become a classic'  Alison Lurie

Winner of the Whitbread First Book Prize

'As haunting as good fiction: the proper effect of a biography where warm sympathy and precise observation go hand in hard'  Listener

Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonically hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more.