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Dodger

Dodger

by Terry Pratchett

First published 2012 · 402 pages · about 7 hours to read

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About this book

Beloved and bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett's Dodger, a Printz Honor Book, combines high comedy with deep wisdom in a tale of one remarkable boy's rise in a fantasy-infused Victorian London. Seventeen-year-old Dodger is content as a sewer scavenger. But he enters a new world when he rescues a young girl from a beating, and her fate impacts some of the most powerful people in England. From Dodger's encounter with the mad barber Sweeney Todd, to his meetings with the great writer Charles Dickens and the calculating politician Benjamin Disraeli, history and fantasy intertwine in a breathtaking account of adventure and mystery. A storm. Rain-lashed city streets. A flash of lightning. A scruffy lad sees a girl leap desperately from a horse-drawn carriage in a vain attempt to escape her captors. Can the lad stand by and let her be caught again? Of course not, because he's Dodger. Seventeen-year-old Dodger may be a street urchin, but he gleans a living from London's sewers, and he knows a jewel when he sees one. He's not about to let anything happen to the unknown girl -- not even if her fate impacts some of the most powerful people in England. From Dodger's encounter with the mad barber Sweeney Todd to his meetings with the great writer Charles Dickens and the calculating politician Benjamin Disraeli, history and fantasy intertwine in a breathtaking account of adventure and mystery.

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Quotes

  • “Young man, the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.”
    Chapter 3
More quotes
  • “What is the truth? you might ask, if I was giving you a chance to speak, which at the moment I am not. My answer to you would be that the truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant.”
    Chapter 7
  • “Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.”
    Chapter 11
  • “The naughty ladies might give you a farthing for setting a gentleman’s footsteps in the right direction. As he grew older, he realized that some people would say that was, in fact, the wrong direction; there were two ways of looking at the world, but only one when you are starving.”
    Chapter 5
  • “Solomon had earlier tried to give him some inkling of what Julius Caesar was all about, and it seemed to Dodger to be about something like a gang fight, except that everybody talked too much.”
    Chapter 14

Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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