Great Expectations

Pip is an orphan with no particular prospects until a mysterious benefactor changes everything, pulling him out of his quiet life and into the drawing rooms of Victorian society. Wealth and status follow, but so do harder lessons in love and loss, as Pip finds that expectations - his own and everyone else's - are not always what they seem. Dickens's novel is as much about ambition and identity as it is about what wealth actually turns out to be worth.