
Far from the Madding Crowd (Oxford World's Classics)
1874 · 496 pages
Three men want Bathsheba Everdene, who runs her own farm: a shepherd, a neighbor she unhinges with a joke valentine, and a soldier. Hardy stages a storm you will not forget.
★ 7.1

Three men want Bathsheba Everdene, who runs her own farm: a shepherd, a neighbor she unhinges with a joke valentine, and a soldier. Hardy stages a storm you will not forget.

The first novel any Black Zimbabwean woman published in English opens with a girl not sorry her brother died: his death frees her for the mission school, where education costs her cousin everything.

In an Egyptian prison a woman awaiting execution tells a psychiatrist her life: genital mutilation, forced marriage, prostitution, and the man she killed. El Saadawi drew it from a real condemned prisoner.