Henry Fielding’s bawdy, colorful, high-spirited novel painted human vices and virtues with unprecedented honesty and good humor, making Tom Jones as fresh and entertaining today as it was when first published nearly three hundred years ago.
A foundling of mysterious parentage, Tom Jones is brought up by the benevolent and wealthy Squire Allworthy as his own son.
As a young man, Tom falls in love with the beautiful and unattainable Sophia Western, a neighbor’s daughter, whose marriage has already been arranged. When Tom’s sexual misadventures around the countryside get him banished, he sets out to make his fortune and find his true identity. Against the vivid background of eighteenth-century London, Tom Jones encounters passion, corruption, danger, and intrigue before finally claiming his fortune, legitimacy, and true love.
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"This book is great fun, in an 18th century way, of course. This is the convoluted, witty, charming story of a young man who has many grand qualities, among them generosity of both spirit and pocket, impeccable manners, captivating good looks, grace, spirit, resilience, courage and pluck. He has a few failings to go with these, primary among them that he has a young man's predilection for falling into bed with just about anyone who finds him attractive (which is just about every woman who comes his way). This gets him into untold amounts of trouble, as you might imagine. He also is excessively trusting, which gets him is another pile of trouble. But we are never less than wholly on Tom's side. A delightful story that I would recommend to anyone."
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Reid (4 out of 5 stars)