

“To read the first pages is to be trapped for seven-hundred odd more: you cannot stop turning them.” - The New Yorker It is an immersing experience.” - Los Angeles Times Book Review In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated. And the invitation is irresistible.” - San Francisco Chronicle


“A bold and vivid tale that invites the reader to get lost in the intoxicating rhythms of another world. It is, quite simply, superb.” - Chicago Sun-Times It is an epic, a tour de force, a staggeringly complex and tantalizingly layered tale that will keep readers engrossed in days. One is swept along by those enduring emotions that defy modern art and a random universe: hunger for revenge, longing for justice and the fantasy secretly entertained by most people that the bad will be punished and the good rewarded.” - The New York Times “So compulsively absorbing that reality disappears. An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary-a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century-London itself.
