Sequins is a powerful and unusual book, in that it combines the familiar traveller's tales with an account of another kind of journey and process of discovery, as Johnson confronts the 'ghost who was haunting herself' in order that she might come to terms with her sense of a fragmented identity

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.

Clever and witty, packed with fiercely academic research and erudite analysis, but written in featherlight, elegant prose.

The Turning Point...builds incrementally towards Bleak House...[and] makes for a very satisfying finale... Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has taken pains of his own and this wonderfully entertaining book is the result.

Douglas-Fairhurst is a shrewd, amusing and original guide... [he] gives you fascinating facts... [and] a brisk and brilliant analysis of Bleak House.

[The Turning Point] is beautifully written and packed with wonders and insight and I shall definitely be rereading it before the year is out. Moreover, by the author's holding the magnifying glass aloft and allowing the sun to focus on one spot, 1851, the leaf catches flame.

[The Turning Point] hums with the intellectual life of the day.

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.

A fascinating biography that ultimately brings fresh insight to the life of Charles Dickens and his work as a novelist.

Sparklingly informative

The Turning Point is a perceptive and enjoyable account of how deeply enmeshed Dickens's art was with the shifting cultural landscape of mid-Victorian England; it illustrates why he was the emblematic novelist of the age.

Douglas-Fairhurst's... immersive book echoes the experimental form of the novel, blending stories, sub-plots and telling details to bring to life a complex moment in the life of a city and one of its greatest writers.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst pulls off an extraordinary trick of immersive history, taking a single year in Charles Dickens's life, 1851, and placing the personal story of one of the most extraordinary writers ever to have lived within his social and cultural context

It's amazing how eruditely Robert Douglas-Fairhurst manages to illuminate our history through a microscopic focus on one brief period.

It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens.

A startling and exciting writer.

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.