Recommended by
- Richard Branson — Listed in Richard Branson's own 'My Top 65 Books To Read In A Lifetime' published on Virgin.com source ↗
Summary
Charles Dickens's 1861 novel, considered his most carefully constructed work, tracing the life of orphan Pip Pirrip from a terrified childhood encounter with an escaped convict in a Kent churchyard through his improbable rise to a London gentleman funded by an anonymous benefactor. The story is built around Pip's mistaken assumptions about the source of his fortune, his snobbish rejection of the people who truly care for him, and his eventual reckoning with the reality of who his benefactor is. A bildungsroman saturated with guilt, class anxiety, and the question of what constitutes a gentleman, it is Dickens at his most psychologically intricate.