Leon Garfield Books

I have a passion for books set in eighteenth and nineteenth-century London – tales brimming with dark courts, fog-bound alleyways and n’er do wells lurking in the shadows. There are echoes of Oliver Twist in this story about Smith, a ragamuffin pickpocket, who, when he steals a mysterious ‘dockiment’ from an elderly man, gets caught up in a murderous plot that puts both his, and his sisters’ lives in terrible danger. Garfield was a master storyteller and his books may – as was the case with me – prove to be the perfect stepping stone to Dickens.