Great Expectations

From the introduction

Pip begins by trying to read his own history from the lettering on his parents' gravestones. He has little knowledge and an active imagination, a combination that will matter throughout Great Expectations. An orphan living with his sister and her blacksmith husband, Joe Gargery, he knows the flat Kent marshes, the forge and the frightening authority of adults. A meeting in the churchyard brings the wider world abruptly close. Dickens makes the child's terror both convincing and strangely comic: even in danger, Pip notices clothes, voices, gestures and the absurd shapes people assume. The novel asks how such a boy learns to imagine a future, and what happens when he begins to despise the life already around him.

An excerpt from the original Read Classics introduction.