Read Mrs Dalloway

A Hebridean summer house before and after the war; the "Time Passes" section.

Five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock; Woolf's essay on women and writing.

Thomas Cromwell rises under Henry VIII in the present tense; Mantel's first Booker.

Two families in Willesden across the postwar decades; Zadie Smith at 24.

Pip, Magwitch on the marshes and Miss Havisham's rotting cake.

Dickens' favourite child, from a blacking factory to a writer's desk; Micawber and Uriah Heep.

London and Paris during the Terror; "it is a far, far better thing that I do".

Please, sir, I want some more; Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Bill Sikes.