by Louis Bayard
—Orlando Sentinel
“Richly imagined, deeply compelling…. A tense, rollicking ride with more bumps, twists, and hairpin turns than a hansom cab yanked down a winding cobblestone street by a team of wild horses.”
—Salon.com
“An audacious and triumphant entertainment…. With surprising but plausible twists, and a visceral, bawdy evocation of Victorian London, Bayard has crafted a page-turner of a thriller that is elevated beyond its genre by its endearingly flawed hero for whom nothing human is alien.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Inventive…. Bayard drenches the reader in the underbelly of 1860sLondon and, in true Dickensian fashion, makes us care passionately about the fates of his characters…. A first-rate entertainment.”
—Booklist
“A clever premise and smartly detailed prose.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Bayard creates several clever ligatures to Dickens’s original text, but it would be wrong to consider Mr. Timothy a sequel: its intent is not to show how characters turned out but rather, at least in part, to meditate on the question of identity and loss, and redemption as well, drawing on A Christmas Carol for a few founding precepts. When it evokes the original, it’s with a sly twist.”
—Washington Post Book World
“This Christmas Carol for the new millennium is highly recommended. If you have not had your fill of ghost-ridden heroes, needy orphans, and foggy nights in cobblestone streets, this sequel—with its breakneck plot, colorful characters, and the reappearance of Scrooge and the Cratchits—will fill the bill.”
—Library Journal
“Poignant…. Makes the always-valid point that families can be formed wherever there is trust, generosity, teamwork, and a little Christmas magic.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“I read gleefully and full of admiration and pleasure—a total delight. The voice and intelligence behind the book are a real marvel.”
—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife and Four Spirits
“Imagine a latter-day Victorian thriller with all of the moral passion of a Dickens novel but none of the quaint sentimentality. Mr. Timothy is an exciting read, a rich historical re-creation, a literary meditation on character, and, most affectingly, a spiritual ghost story about the long, broad, and all-encompassing reach of family.”
—Gary Krist, bestselling author of Extravagance
“Mr. Timothy is a spirited and absorbing thriller, and Louis Bayard is a very talented writer.”
—Kevin Baker, author of Paradise Alley
“Timothy Cratchit, now a twenty-three-year-old making his living teaching a madam to read, has to confront not only horrifying murders but also his own powerful ghosts, his relationship with his father, and the specter of his own goodness. Bayard crafts a satisfying, gruesome thriller and a moving meditation on fathers, sons, and the making of a family.”
—Sarah Smith, bestselling author of The Vanished Child
“God bless us, yes indeed. What a terrific book.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“A first-class historical thriller…. Despite its dark undertones, Mr.Timothy is filled with optimism and the strength of the human heart, much as the original to which it pays homage.”
—Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“A real page-turner.”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune
“A rowdy…thrilling ride.”
—Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, N.J.)
“Thank heavens for Louis Bayard…. [He] has crafted a book of which the inimitable Boz himself would be proud. Adopting a neo-Victorian prose style, the author peppers his pages with Dickensian wit and, above all, memorable characters.”
—January magazine
“Like Dickens, Bayard plunges us immediately into the whirling cauldron of this great, awful metropolis, replete with a narrative that holds more curves than Hyde Park’s Serpentine River, odd, funny characters, sinister villains, and pathetic child victims…. This novel…[is] authentic and flavorful: a solid, old-fashioned, tucked-into-bed kind of book.”
—Frontiers magazine
“A brilliant starting point of an idea, a richly evocative setting, a panoply of hilarious, menacing, and heartbreaking characters, and two brilliant authors, one working at the absolute top of his game.”
—Metro Weekly
ALSO BY LOUIS BAYARD
Fool’s Errand
Endangered Species
Credits
Cover design by Mary Schuck
Cover illustration © by Bisson Fréres, The Portal of Saint Ursinus at Bourges, Mary and Leigh B. Block Purchase Fund, 1980.213 Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago
Copyright
MR. TIMOTHY. Copyright © 2003 by Louis Bayard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2006 ISBN: 9780061854187
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Bayard, Louis.
Mr. Timothy : a novel / Louis Bayard.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-053421-4
ISBN 0-06-053422-2 (pbk.)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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