Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

The first "Great" Wessex novel is surprisingly hard to get into at first but eventually the going gets a bit easier and the flow of events starts to grip the attention. Bathsheba's near-disastrous marriage pre-echoes Hardy's later, more tragic, treatments of that institution. But in this book good still triumphs at the end and the long arc of struggle eventually yields a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

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