In the Library
Barry Lyndon
William Makepeace Thackeray, 1844
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 9 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 19
- Length
- Length 126k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Daniel Defoe
Defoe invented the rogue's own memoir a century earlier, but Moll counts her sins honestly, where Barry cannot see that he has any to count.
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The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
Ford does the same thing seventy years on, but his narrator is a decent man who cannot see straight, rather than a scoundrel who will not.
£1.99
About the book
Every word of this book comes from a liar, and he has no idea you can tell. Redmond Barry sets down the history of his rise with enormous satisfaction: the duel that sent him running out of Ireland, the two armies he ran from, the years working faro tables across half the courts of Europe, the heiress he besieged until she gave in. All of it he offers as proof of his breeding. You read the true story straight through the boastful one, and for a long stretch it is gloriously funny. Then the marriage begins, and the laughter goes out of the room. He spends a woman's fortune, thrashes her son, keeps her watched inside her own house, and reports all of it in the same delighted voice, so the comedy keeps running while the horror gathers underneath it. Thackeray knew how tenderly a scoundrel narrates his own cruelty. Barry is still boasting on the last page, and by then you can hear the walls of the room he is boasting in.