- Published: 14 September 2021
- ISBN: 9781787330702
- Imprint: Jonathan Cape
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 368
- RRP: $49.99
The Turning Point
A Year that Changed Dickens and the World















- Published: 14 September 2021
- ISBN: 9781787330702
- Imprint: Jonathan Cape
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 368
- RRP: $49.99
This immersive biography, by the author of the Costa-shortlisted The Story of Alice, had me hooked... published in a sumptuous package, with illustrations throughout.
The Bookseller, Editor's Choice
This tremendous book dazzles and delights... it's full of discoveries. A glorious book; revealing and unravelling Charles Dickens before our very eyes, melding his life and his work, using scholarship, wit and passion - a triumph.
Miriam Margolyes
Clever and witty, packed with fiercely academic research and erudite analysis, but written in featherlight, elegant prose.
Natalie Haynes
The Turning Point...builds incrementally towards Bleak House...[and] makes for a very satisfying finale. A manuscript page of the novel, dense with crossings-out of emendations, is reproduced as evidence of Dickens's painstaking process of creation. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has taken pains of his own and this wonderfully entertaining book is the result.
Anthony Quinn, Observer
Douglas-Fairhurst is a shrewd, amusing and original guide... [he] gives you fascinating facts... [and] a brisk and brilliant analysis of Bleak House.
Laura Freeman, The Times
[The Turning Point] hums with the intellectual life of the day.
Rose Shepherd, Saga Magazine
Taking his cue from that novel [Bleak House], Douglas-Fairhurst uses a fascinating range of interconnected sources, side-plots and telling details to dramatise the complex social and imaginative web out of which it came...He gives us history not as grand narrative or teleology but as total immersion and multiplicity. As such, Douglas-Fairhurst invites us to feel what it felt like to be Dickens in 1851.
Lucasta Miller, Financial Times
A fascinating biography that ultimately brings fresh insight to the life of Charles Dickens and his work as a novelist.
Tom Williams, Spectator
Sparklingly informative
Guardian
A startling and exciting writer.
Spectator (THE STORY OF ALICE)
In a year of striking biographies, the most striking of all - due to its erudition, empathy and freshness of approach - is Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens.
TLS (BECOMING DICKENS)
It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens.
New Statesman (BECOMING DICKENS)