“Cityread showed me the whole of London, literally, and it is a huge, beautiful, book reading city.”
Ben Aaronovitch, author of Cityread 2015

Discover Cityread London 2012

Dark, mysterious and mordantly funny, Oliver Twist features some of the most memorably drawn villains in all of fiction - the treacherous gangmaster Fagin, the menacing thug Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger and their den of thieves in the grimy London backstreets. Dickens’ novel is both an angry indictment of poverty, and an adventure filled with an air of threat and pervasive evil.

About Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth where his father was a clerk in the navy pay office. The family moved to London in 1823, but their fortunes were severely impaired. Dickens was sent to work in a blacking-warehouse when his father was imprisoned for debt. Both experiences deeply affected the future novelist. In 1833 he began contributing stories to newspapers and magazines, and in 1836 started the serial publication of Pickwick Papers. Thereafter, Dickens published his major novels over the course of the next twenty years, from Nicholas Nickleby to Little Dorrit. He also edited the journals Household Words and All the Year Round. Dickens died in June 1870.

“A very readable, perhaps even rabble-rousing tale about a roused rabble and the water-cannon-firing 'forces of law and order'”
Literary Review
“A page turner intent on keeping you avidly on edge into the small hours”
Metro
“Cracking ... an acute indictment of the power play between politicians and police ... Slovo's subject matter could not be more prescient”
Louise Doughty, The Guardian
“Ten Days tackles the dangers we all face when politics and policing collide. The result: an unputdownable Slovo read.”
Shami Chakrabarti
“An extraordinary novel - a page-turner thick with greed, ambition, love and secrets, and simultaneously an incisive portrayal of power and powerlessness in today's Britain”
Kamila Shamsie
“Sweeping in ambition and with a fine command of political and policing detail, this makes salutary, and alarming, reading.”
Daily Mail
“Slovo takes the London riots of 2011 as her blueprint, but she moves beyond that... Rather brilliantly, she increases the tension”
The Spectator
“Ten days of tension, trouble and tough truths . . . a cracker”
Val McDermid
oliver-twist

Publisher: Penguin

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