The Dickens Boy

Thomas Keneally Sceptre €24

Published to mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s death, the latest novel from the author of Schindler’s Ark unfolds as a bustling picaresque tale built around the life of Dickens’s tenth child, 16-year-old Edward, packed off to Australia to build his character on a sheep station. Keneally, who is also a historian, has a habit of waylaying the reader with detail, but there are some unforgettably vivid scenes in this rompy but emotive story of bruised youth.