Great Expectations

From the young Pip’s first terrifying encounter with the convict Magwitch in the gloom of a graveyard, to the spendidly morbid set pieces in Miss Havisham’s mansion, to the magnificently realized boat chase down the Thames, Great Expectations is filled with the transcendent excitement that Dickens could so abundantly provide. Written in 1860, at the height of his maturity, it also reveals the novelist’s bitter-sweet understanding of the extent to which our deepest moral dilemmas are born of our own obsessions and illusions.