"One does not need to have read a single word of The Pickwick Papers to be enthralled by the story of how this extraordinary novel came to be. The creation and afterlife of this masterpiece is the subject of Stephen Jarvis's novel ... This vast, intricately constructed, indeed Dickensian work is at once [an] ... homage to a much-loved book, tracing its genesis and subsequent history in ... detail, and a damning indictment of how an ambitious young writer expropriated another man's ideas and then engaged in an elaborate cover-up of The Pickwick Papers' true origin"--