Under the Harrow — Mark Dunn

What if Charles Dickens had written a contemporary thriller? In Under the Harrow, a group of Victorians live a semi-idyllic and unwitting, anachronistic existence, aided only by minimal trade-related contact with the supposedly plague-ridden Outland. They are products of an experiment that had become a lucrative, voyeuristic peep-box for millionaires and their billionaire descendants. But the experiment has run its course, and Dingley Dell must be totally expunged--and with it, all trace of the thousands of men, women, and children who live there. A few Dinglians learn the secret of both their manipulated past and their doomed future, and it is this motley group of Dickensian innocents who must race the clock to save their fellow countrymen and themselves from mass annihilation. Under the Harrow showcases the kind of dazzling wordplay and narrative richness that have made Mark Dunn's novels and plays both commercially successful and critically acclaimed.