David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickenss own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. Praising Dickenss power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: There were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickenss exultant imagination...you can never quite forget them.