You Gotta Have Heart: On Tim Murphy’s Christodora

Novelist and reporter Tim Murphy’s latest, lengthy book Christodora is a page-turner, the sort of sprawling novel that most people refer to as Dickensian. It is written in a heated spirit of urgency, often with shorthand phrases about what characters are feeling. I resisted it for a while, even as I kept on turning the pages to find out what would happen next. But this book eventually won me over. Murphy has an imaginative talent for exploring the subjectivities of his characters, particul