My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen

From the Publisher

A thrillingly imagined rollercoaster of a novel bursting with sex, time travel, and true love.

Charlotte Schleswig, the delightful narrator of Liz Jensen’s latest novel, supports herself and the lumpen Fru Schleswig (who may or may not be her mother) as a prostitute in 1890s Copenhagen. While she is no small success at the trade, she leaps at a new job opportunity for herself and Fru Schleswig, as cleaning ladies for the wealthy widow Krak. But mysteries abound at Fru Krak’s dark old mansion. The basement appears to be haunted, townspeople claim to have seen the dead Professor Krak walking the streets as a ghost, and there are stories of desperate souls who paid the professor a visit and never emerged. In fact, as Charlotte will discover, there is a simple explanation for all this: the basement is home to a time machine. When their cunning investigations land them in trouble, Charlotte and Fru Schleswig find themselves catapulted through time and space to modern-day London, and there their adventures truly begin.

With the minxy, intrepid Charlotte, Liz Jensen introduces a heroine every bit as memorable as Louis Drax. And with My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, she delivers yet another outlandishly entertaining novel, in which the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of spacetime proves no match for human ingenuity and earthly passion.

Publishers Weekly

When 25-year-old Charlotte Schleswig begins telling her madcap tale in 1897, she's a successful prostitute roaming the suburban streets near Denmark's capital. A random meeting in a bakery leads her to begin working as a domestic for Fru Krak, an anxious woman whose husband has recently disappeared under mysterious circumstances and who may now be haunting the very streets Charlotte walks. Charlotte soon sets out to find the missing Professor Krak, and in the course of her investigations discovers 21st-century London, a whole new world of mobile phones, microwaves, flavored condoms, suicide machines and a handsome archeologist named Fergus. Jensen (The Ninth Life of Louis Drax) satisfactorily coats a predictable romance with a shiny time-traveling sci-fi glaze, mixes a dash of irony and suspense, and pushes it all through Charlotte's energetic first person, which carries the book. The final result is fun and sometimes scintillating, but not necessarily delicious-like a flavored condom. (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A quick-witted prostitute in 19th-century Copenhagen finds love in 21st-century London. Charlotte Schleswig has many survival skills, which is a good thing. Since she ran away from the orphanage, she has been supporting herself and Fru Schleswig, the slovenly, illiterate cook who followed her, claiming to be her mother. (Charlotte doesn't believe her.) Nonetheless, she does what she must to keep a roof over their heads, and she keeps watch for blackmail opportunities and other better money-making schemes. When the pompous widow Fru Krak advertises for a maid, Charlotte applies. Fru Krak instructs Charlotte (who negotiates the position for herself and Fru Schleswig) to make her house presentable for her intended, a Parson, but never to enter the basement . . . which is where Charlotte goes at the first chance. There she finds a strange contraption rumored to be a Suicide Machine. Before he disappeared, Fru Krak's husband, professor Herr Krak, is said to have offered trips to the "great beyond." And although his ghost has been spied around the city, his body has never been found. Charlotte investigates, but the hapless Fru Schleswig intervenes, and suddenly the two of them find themselves in 21st-century London. Professor Krak and a group of other displaced Dutch citizens greet them. After introducing Charlotte and Fru Schleswig to the wonders of modern times-Fru Schleswig is particularly taken with the vacuum cleaner-they enlist Charlotte to travel back to Copenhagen and help them protect the time machine from Fru Krak, who will surely destroy it before her impending marriage, cutting off their opportunity to ever return. Charlotte hopes to profit from happenstance, until she unexpectedlyfalls in love with a Scottish archaeologist-who thinks she is Croatian. She has a wee bit of explaining to do. Jensen (The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, 2005, etc.) has created a marvelous heroine in Charlotte, whose agile mind and love/hate relationship with the doltish Fru Schleswig give this Time and Again-esque love story a comic spin. Great fun for any century.

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