Official book description:For his entire life, Charley Sutherland has concealed a magical ability he can’t quite control: he can bring characters from books into the real world. His older brother, Rob – a young lawyer with an utterly normal life – hopes that this strange family secret will disappear with disuse, and he will be discharged from his duty of protecting Charley and the real world from each other.
But then, literary characters start causing trouble in their city, making threats about destroying the world, and for once, it isn’t Charley’s doing. There’s someone else out there who shares his powers and it’s up to Charley and a reluctant Rob to stop them – before anyone gets to The End.
This was the September selection of my fantasy/sci-fi book club, and yet another book I’ve read this year where I hadn’t heard of the author or book before picking it up. Only a few weeks before reading this book, I watched the new Armando Ianucci adaptation of David Copperfield, as that gave me a little bit of insight into Uriah Heep as a character and the general plot of the novel he originates in. There’s a bunch of other famous literary characters who turn up over the course of the story, proving to me that taking a total of three years of English literature studies as part of my university career wasn’t a complete waste of time.
Among the famous literary characters who turn up over the course of the book, we find Dorian Gray, who in this version could give Lisbeth Salander a run for her money where hacking and computer surveillance are concerned, a very temperamentally unstable Heathcliff, the White Witch of Narnia who rides a motorcycle (much easier upkeep than reindeer) and wears a motorcycle, and five different versions of Fitzwilliam Darcy (they all share a house, only one has bothered to learn how to cook). Neither of these have been read to life by Charlie, one of our protagonists, they have appeared because some reader, or the collective imagination of readers in general made them manifest. They all live in a strange, mostly hidden side street in downtown Wellington, New Zealand, where Charlie works as a university professor and his brother Rob is a lawyer.
Full review on my blog.