A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens’s superhuman imagination, from one of the greatest cultural critics of our time. See Dickens as never before in this creative biography of his life through his storytelling – the characters, places and emotions conjured up across the entire range of his novels, stories, magazine articles and public readings. Peter Conrad, one of the great cultural critics of our time, repositions Dickens as a true giant of literature – a magician with the power to work wonders, at his most ambitious a god-like creator who formed his own idiosyncratic world and populated it with hundreds of irrepressibly lively and often terrifying characters.

Peter argues that Dickens alone rivals Shakespeare and in many ways outdoes him. he pays tribute to Dickens's almost industrial productivity as a writer, but also calculates the physical and mental strain it involved and the consequent upheavals in his emotional life. The forces of creation and destruction meet in Dickens, who was ultimately – as he acknowledged in his unfinished murder story The Mystery of Edwin Drood – torn apart by his own frenetic genius.

This is a celebration, an examination and an exploration of the most powerfully transformative imagination in literature, a force that was at once divine and devilish. Peter Conrad's own expansive critical mind makes this book both a gift if you already love Dickens and a key to the work if you have yet to read him.