- Published: 15 August 2016
- ISBN: 9780099593485
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 816
- RRP: $29.99
Death and Mr Pickwick
- Published: 15 August 2016
- ISBN: 9780099593485
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 816
- RRP: $29.99
A huge and hugely impressive first novel for both fans of immersive reads and of Dickens’ London.
Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
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.
Publishers Weekly starred review
An impressive debut.
Frances Wilson, New Statesman
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.
Lucasta Miller, Independent
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.
Daily Mail
A bravura exercise in fictionalized literary criticism.
DJ Taylor, Guardian
You’ll be reluctant to leave its rambunctious world of creative intrigue and betrayal.
Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday
Original and very enjoyable… The narrative may be complex but the reading experience is leisurely and pleasant.
Lindsay Duguid, The Times Literary Supplement
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.
Kate Saunders, Saga Magazine
An outstanding debut novel.
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
This is a masterpiece of imagination supported by a mountain of research.
Christian House, 4 stars, Sunday Telegraph
Richly imaginative,… Jarvis’ first novel represents a major achievement.
Good Book Guide
Astpnishing
David Sexton, Evening Standard
A novel as crowded, rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Observer
A book as crowded and rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman
A vast, sprawling epic, packed with digression and detail, it is a brilliant achievement for a first-time novelist.
Nick Rennison, BBC History Magazine
The work of a genius
John Bird, Big Issue
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.
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times