This event took place 24 February 2022, 12:30 pm–2:00 pm.
With Joseph Boone (USC) and John Mullan (UCL).
Why does Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations continue to inspire readers and authors today? In this event, John Mullan, Professor of English at UCL, is in conversation with Joseph Boone, the author of a new novel, Furnace Creek, which is inspired by Dicken’s masterpiece. Furnace Creek teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues—racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class struggle—that galvanized the world in those decades. Advance copies of the novel have garnered high praise from readers. This promises to be a riveting discussion between the novelist and one of our most distinguished literary critics.