Twist

Charles Dickens meets Guy Ritchie in Grass’s fast-paced debut set in contemporary London, a reimagining of Oliver Twist as a caper novel. Oliver, a homeless 18-year-old, is on the run for tagging walls and the odd police car with graffiti. But Oliver is no ordinary graffiti artist. He’s so talented he’s recruited into a squad of art thieves mentored by Cornelius Fagin, an elderly Romanian refugee who’s planning an ambitious art heist, and Oliver has just the skills Fagin needs to pull it off. If only the potential buyer wasn’t a Russian crime kingpin who’s as likely to kill them as pay them. The gang’s all here: Dodge and Batesy, Cribb, Bullseye the dog, and Nancy Lee. Oliver falls hard for Nancy, even though she’s under the thumb of jealous psychopath Bill Sikes. Fagin’s gang must execute the heist of their lives without being caught by either the Russian mob or Scotland Yard. Oliver, meanwhile, is more interested in freeing Nancy from Sikes. This often reads like a movie script as one action scene follows another with little down time, and indeed publication will coincide with the release of a motion picture based on the book starring Michael Caine. Grass cleverly brings Dickens’s acrobatic crew of street urchins into the 21st century. (Feb.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review referred to the author using an incorrect surname.