Bleak House

The story is told in two voices: Esther's warm first-person narrative and a sharp, satirical narrator who moves through fashionable drawing rooms, law offices and the poorest streets of London. Meanwhile the elegant, cold Lady Dedlock is shaken when she recognizes the handwriting on a legal document, and the secretive lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn begins to investigate her past. Richard, meanwhile, becomes dangerously obsessed with the hope that the lawsuit will one day make him rich.

Dickens fills the novel with unforgettable figures, from the shrewd Inspector Bucket, one of the first detectives in English fiction, to the poor crossing sweeper Jo, the cheerful sponger Harold Skimpole and the eccentric Miss Flite with her caged birds. The book is a savage attack on the slowness and cruelty of the legal system and on the neglect of the poor, and it includes deaths, illness and suffering, handled with compassion. Its length and many subplots demand patience, but the mystery holds it together.

Ambitious, moving and brilliantly written, often called Dickens's greatest novel. It rewards slow reading over several weeks, and many readers find that its characters stay with them long afterwards. About 1088 pages in the Penguin Classics paperback, edited by Nicola Bradbury.