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The Turning Point

A Year That Changed Dickens and the World

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A major new biography of Charles Dickens, tracing the year that would transform his life and times.

By 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's also a turbulent time 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' 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' 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. 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.

©2021 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (P)2021 Penguin Audio Art & Literature Authors Europe Great Britain England

Critic reviews

"It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens." (New Statesman)

"A startling and exciting writer." (A. S. Byatt, Spectator)

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I like this book and the narrator is really good too. So talented and emotional performance.

Very good audiobook

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What a fantastic book. Really enjoyed going back a almostvtwo centuries to cover Dickens's life. Really great, many thanks. Super narrator too.

wonderful

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What a good listen this was. By concentrating on just the one year of his life, and being brutally honest, this biography gives an excellent sense of the personality of Dickens, rather than just what he did / wrote. There is also a nice little sideline in the social history of the great exhibition of 1851.

Excellent Biography

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Interesting book. Unfortunately. The reader who has a pleasant voice & clear diction spoils it. Perhaps because this is about Dickens, he reads the book in a loud jocular tone which quickly jars. On my nerves anyway. Dickens isnt just a laugh. He was a brilliant writer of characters & troubled times. Yes his work was made amenable by his humour but that humour is subtle. The reader seems to have fallen into a trap of his own making.

Disappointing

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