New Releases by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

A darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor We all have trapdoors in our lives. Sometimes we jump off just in time ... But sometimes we are unlucky. My own trapdoor was hidden in the consulting room of an Oxford neurologist. When the trapdoor opened for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, he plummeted into a world of MRI scans, a disobedient body and the crushing unpredictability of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. But, like Alice tumbling into Wonderland, his fall did something else. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes, his fears, his loves and losses, and the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined. From Kafka to Barbellion, this is a literary map of the journey from the kingdom of the well to the land of the sick, and forwards into a hopeful future. It''s an ode to great writing, to storytelling, to science and to the power of the imagination. ''A pitch-perfect memoir: stylish, erudite, touchingly honest and darkly funny'' Jacqueline Wilson

A major new biography that takes an unusual and illuminating approach to the great writer—immersing us in one year of his life—from the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice. The year is 1851. It''s a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty, and disease. It is also a turbulent year in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens''s career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people''s lives and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming. The Turning Point transports us into the foggy streets of Dickens''s London, closely following the twists and turns of a year that would come to define him and forever alter Britain''s relationship with the world. Fully illustrated, and brimming with fascinating details about the larger-than-life man who wrote Bleak House, this is the closest look yet at one of the greatest literary personalities ever to have lived.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates two entangled lives: the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories. This relationship influenced Carroll’s imaginative creation of Wonderland—a sheltered world apart during the stormy transition from the Victorian to the modern era

This provocative biography tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England’s greatest novelist. Focused on the 1830s, it portrays a restless, uncertain Dickens who could not decide on a career path. Through twists and turns, the author traces a double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel.

"This major study examines a Victorian obsession with ''influence'', the often unpredictable after-effects of words and actions, in fields as diverse as mesmerism and theology, literary theory, and sanitation reform. For writers such as Tennyson, FitzGerald, and Dickens, the idea is both a theoretical and a practical problem. Survival is not only what their writing critically examines, but also what it sets out to achieve." - BOOK JACKET.