“I’ve just read Jack Maggs by Peter Carey which is one of the few books that I’ve read in recent years that is unputdownable.

It’s a story about an English convict who’s been sent off to Australia, and then returns with a new persona to reclaim his property and to find his surrogate son. The process and the people that he meets along the way and how the story unfolds and what happened to everybody is page turningly brilliant. It’s the most immediate visceral and entertaining novel about Victorian London that I have ever read. It reinvents Dickens. Even if you meet somebody who’s a paragraph’s worth, you know exactly who they are because he describes a kind of kink in somebody’s character that gives you physiological insight into how this person’s mind operates which is an astonishing gift in a writer.”