Bleak House

Dickens's chilling tale of murder and betrayal

Sunday Times

Kafka's favourite book, a tour de force that mixes grand scale and minutely-observed, perfectly-heard reality. Incomparable set-pieces (that opening! spontaneous combustion!) and dialogue

James Hawes

I keep on reading it in order to discover how to write a novel

John Mortimer

Bleak House reads like an encyclopedia not only of its time and place but of us

Elizabeth Kostova

Bleak House is the literati's favourite Dickens. It's one of the few stories that has modern resonance: the tale of a never-ending court case can be seen -if you squint -as the precursor of Kafka and Orwell

A.A. Gill

In addition to the usual range of Dickensian characters, scathing social observations and the first detective in British fiction, Bleak House features a murder, a frame-up for that murder, a child's tragic death, a character who dies by spontaneous combustion, a young beauty who loses her looks after catching smallpox, an opium addict and a secret love affair that produced an illegitimate child

Daily Mail

Dickens is huge - like the sky. Pick any page of Dickens and it's immediately recognizable as him, yet he might be doing social satire, or farce, or horror, or a psychological study of a murderer - or any combination of these

Susannah Clarke

Dickens has genius to vivify his observation

Spectator

He deals truly with human nature, which never can degrade; he takes up everything, good, bad, or indifferent, which he works up into a rich alluvial deposit.He is natural, and that never can be ridiculous

Quarterly Review