The Mayor of Casterbridge

A man sells his wife at a country fair and spends the rest of his life trying to outrun that morning, which is the single irreversible act Thomas Hardy builds this novel upon. Hardy sets the story in his fictional Wessex, among corn markets, harvest weather and small-town office-holding, and follows Michael Henchard's climb to respectability and his slow undoing. The book is often read for its handling of chance and character, and this Penguin Classics edition gives the complete text with notes on Hardy's landscape and vocabulary. Before you add it to the cart: • One of Hardy's Wessex novels, complete and unabridged • A tightly plotted study of one character's rise and fall • Rural trade, weather and small-town politics drawn in detail • Notes on dialect and regional setting for modern readers A solid pick for Hardy readers, literature students and book clubs drawn to nineteenth-century fiction, available at Boipoka.