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Our Mutual Friend
Our Mutual Friend
Nov 21, 2024 2:49 AM

Author:Charles Dickens,Adrian Poole,Adrian Poole

Our Mutual Friend

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'

'The great poet of the city. He was created by London' Peter Ackroyd

Our Mutual Friend centres on an inheritance - Old Harmon's profitable dust heaps - and its legatees: young John Harmon, presumed drowned when a body is pulled out of the Thames, and kindly dustman Mr Boffin, to whom the fortune defaults. With brilliant satire, Dickens portrays a dark, macabre London, inhabited by such disparate characters as Gaffer Hexam, scavenging the river for corpses; enchanting, mercenary Bella Wilfer; the social-climbing Veneerings; and the unscrupulous street-trader Silas Wegg. Dickens's last completed novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames, and of the corrupting power of money.

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Adrian Poole

Reviews

Like Michael Cunningham's The Hours, which won the Pulitzer, Three Junes won its own prize (National Book Award) and deserves it-a highly accomplished and sensitive novel, all the more remarkable for being Julia Glass's first.

—— The Sunday Telegraph

Free of gimmickry, Three Junes brilliantly rescues, then refurbishes, the traditional plot-driven novel.

—— The New York Times

Three Junes almost threatens to burst with all the life it contains. Glass's ability-would be marvellous in any novelist. In a first-time novelist, it's extraordinary.

—— Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours.

This is the one novel that everyone insisted I took with me. Set in a Sudanese village by the Nile, it is a brilliant exploration of African encounters with the West, and the corrupting power of colonialism. I never got this book out to read without someone coming up to tell me how brilliant it was

—— Mary Beard

An Arabian Nights in reverse, enclosing a pithy moral about international misconceptions and delusions...Powerfully and poetically written and splendidly translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

—— Observer

The prose, translated from Arabic, has a grave beauty. It's the story of a man who returns to his native Sudan after being educated in England, then encounters the first Sudanese to get an English education. The near-formal elegance in the writing contrasts with the sly anti-colonial world view of the book, and this makes it even more interesting

—— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Denys Johnson-Davies...the leading Arabic-English translator of our time

—— Edward Said
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