Our Rotten Hearts

Praise

“Our Rotten Hearts is a gripping retelling of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, unpredictable and full of twists and turns; it kept me hooked, and it also kept me guessing! It’s also a sensitively drawn portrait of one of literature’s most maligned characters.” –Flora Carr, author of The Tower

“Heart-wrenching and delicious and impossible to put down, Our Rotten Hearts does for Fagin what Wicked did for The Wicked Witch of the West. Allison Epstein is absolutely at the top of her game.” –Julia Fine, author of Maddalena and the Dark

“More than a simple reimagining of Dickens’s most troubling villain, Our Rotten Hearts is a haunted look at the loneliness of Victorian London’s underworld. Epstein’s rogues and thieves are at once tenderly imagined and savagely cruel, carving out precarious lives in the shadow of the gallows and the jail. Clever, cowardly, soft-hearted and selfish all at once, Jacob Fagin sheds the constraints of his original story and demands the right to speak for himself.” —Celia Bell, author of The Disenchantment

“In a gritty feast of a book which transports readers into Victorian London’s seedy underground, Epstein weaves together a brutal and defiant tale of survival against all odds. Our Rotten Hearts is a story of what freedom means when being a Jew is worse even than being a thief, and the courage it takes to live life in stubborn opposition to a society determined to do its worst.” –Laura R. Samotin, author of The Sins On Their Bones