Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

'We all have trapdoors in our lives. Sometimes we jump off just in time: we defuse an argument with a joke; we swerve to prevent a traffic accident. But sometimes we are unlucky enough to be on the trapdoor when the lever is pulled. My own trapdoor was hidden in the consulting room of an Oxford neurologist.'

When the trapdoor opened for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst he plummeted into a world of MRI scans a disobedient body and the crushing unpredictability of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. But like Alice tumbling into Wonderland his fall did something else. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes his fears his loves and losses... and the books that would sustain inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined.

From Kafka to Barbellion this is a literary map of the journey from the kingdom of the well to the land of the sick and forwards into a hopeful future. It's an ode to great writing to storytelling to science and to the power of the imagination. And above all it's a darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain.

Drawing on previously unpublished material, the author traces the creation and influence of the Alice books against a shifting cultural landscape. He highlights the changing definitions of childhood and sexuality and the tensions inherent in the transition between the Victorian and modern worlds.

The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty and disease. It's also a turbulent time in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart.

But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives, and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming.