Jude the Obscure.

A country boy stares at the distant spires of a great university and dreams himself into their libraries, never guessing how thoroughly the world has decided such doors are not for him.

What it's about

Jude the Obscure follows Jude Fawley, a self-taught stonemason who aspires to a scholar's life in the city of Christminster, and who falls in love with his freethinking cousin Sue Bridehead. Trapped by an early marriage, hemmed in by poverty and convention, Jude and Sue attempt to live honestly outside the rules society sets for them, and are punished for it with a severity that scandalised Hardy's first readers.

Themes

The novel rages against the barriers of class and money that lock the poor out of learning, and against marriage laws that make honesty impossible. It probes faith and doubt, the war between flesh and idealism, and the cruelty of a moral order that mistakes suffering for virtue. Few books are so unsparing about ambition denied.

Why it still matters

The hostility that greeted Jude helped drive Hardy from fiction into poetry, yet its clear sight now looks like courage. Its questions about access to education, the ethics of marriage and the loneliness of the outsider remain live, and its emotional honesty gives it a modern, almost unbearable directness.

Who it's for

For readers ready for Hardy at his darkest, for anyone drawn to novels that challenge social convention, and for those who want fiction that takes ambition, love and injustice with deadly seriousness.