The Oliver Twist links that thread their way through Rebecca Gowers latest novel The Twisted Heart are something that she stumbled across while researching Victorian detective literature in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Since the research was part of her doctorate, readers can be confident of the authenticity of the many 19th-century facts she reveals throughout this modern love story.

Indeed, she lists her source material in a postscript, which also explains how she discovered a genuine murder mystery and gave it to a fictional character to solve.

Rebecca, who now lives in Summertown, has set her story in Oxford, the town she has made her own since arriving at Corpus Christi to read English several years ago. She admits to a further link with Oxford – her grandfather Richard Gowers was the Lord Mayor of Oxford during the Second World War.

She said: “Visiting Oxford when I was a child to see my grandparents was one of those treats I will always remember.

“I have made Oxford my home now. I love the fact Oxford can be managed on foot. I am able to walk wherever I want to go. If I need the railway station I can walk along the canal, and if I need to go to the city centre and the Bodleian, it’s just 20 minutes walk.”

Rebecca’s love of walking perhaps accounts for the fact that her main fictional characters in The Twisted Heart, Kit and Joe, are endlessly walking to or from the East Oxford dance club where they met.

Kit is working on a thesis about the correlations between real-life murders and crime fiction in Victorian times. Joe is a mathematician. The only thing they have in common when they first meet is the dancing they come to share.

Rebecca explained that she put these two people together deliberately.

“I was interested in the imbalance in their relationship. Whereas Joe was able to understand Kit’s work and see where she was coming from, his gift for mathematics was a complete mystery to her.”

To ensure that she got Joe right, Rebecca called on her brother Timothy, a maths professor, to provide her with relevant details about Joe’s special subject.

“My brother proved a real help, and even gave me a list of maths lectures that I needed to describe Joe’s world,” she added.

When Kit’s research leads her to stumble on an extraordinary historical mystery, Rebecca is able to make much of her own discoveries in the Bodleian. In fact, her novel gives her a chance to pose a question that has intrigued her for some time – was there a link between Nancy’s bloody murder in Oliver Twist and the deranged murder of the prostitute Eliza Grimwood, who was known as The Countess?

Conversation between Kit and Joe revolves almost entirely on this question, which become more and more pertinent to their relationship as their friendship blossoms, particularly when Joe admits to reading Oliver Twist in order to enter Kit’s world.

By reading just one novel, Joe is able to question whether Grimwood’s death was a copy-cat murder inspired by Dickens and ask if Dickens sparked off a gruesome, real-life murder.

Rebecca says that in writing this novel she is challenging the reader as well as herself.

“The question is whether the readers want to know about Eliza Grimwood. Does her murder make them want to turn the page? Are we all interested in violence?”

Regardless of whether we are taking vicarious delight in blood-thirsty descriptions of Victorian crimes, Rebecca is convinced we are interested in love. The book gains its strength from the gentle getting-to-know-each other thread that takes Kit and Joe on their journey from the dance club where they met as strangers, unsure of what they feel for each other, to eventually becoming lovers.

As their friendship begins to flourish and withstand various tests, the title of the book takes on its meaning.

Rebecca explained that the word twisted is a play on the Oliver Twist link, and the word heart says the rest. When tied together, these words provide the two halves for the plot and help her successfully tie fiction and non-fiction together.

The Twisted Heart took Rebecca more than a year to write, but now it is finished she is working on her next novel, which will also address the subject of violence.

The Twisted Heart is published by Canongate at £12.99.