Wilkie Collins

Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women and avidly read by generations of readers. Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists, from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. As well as his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone often called the first true detective novel and the sensational The Woman in White, he produced an intriguing array of lesser-known works. Told with Ackroyds inimitable verve, this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great storyteller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.