Oliver Twist The alternative title, "The Parish Boy's Progress", alludes to Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress", as well as the 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, "A Rake's Progress" and "A Harlot's Progress". In this early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises the hypocrisies of his time, including child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own youthful experiences
Lucky Boy (novel) Lucky Boy (novel) Lucky Boy is a 2017 novel written by Shanthi Sekaran and her second book. Soli, an eighteen-year-old woman, enters the United States illegally from Mexico and an Indian American woman named Kavya struggles to have a baby with her husband, who works in Silicon Valley. The two stories converge around a baby, the "lucky boy". Steph Cha of "USA Today" wrote "It’s easy to imagine the lives of these characters even off the page. Lucky Boy pulses with vitality, pumped with the life breath of human sin and love." Kathleen Rooney of the "Chicago Tribune" said "In