Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

On of the things that drives people nuts about Charles Dickens is the sheer number of coincidences in his novels. Inheritances come out of nowhere. Relatives meet by chance in unlikely places. Etc. etc. But because he’s Dickens, ol’ Charles can get away with a lot. I thought of this a lot in Jonathan Barnes’ Cannonbridge. There are a lot of stunning (as in, they will stun you as you read this book) coincidences in Cannonbridge. Barnes is no Dickens, however. But by the end of the book, Barnes reveals a ballsy ending to explain just how a formerly unknown Victorian author managed to meet Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, a young Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle over the course of a century—all without ageing...

Read the rest of my review at Summer Reading Project.