In the Library
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 3.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 9
- Length
- Length 48k 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.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
What buying means
- 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
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway takes Gatsby's lost generation to Paris and strips away the shimmer, leaving only the hangover.
£1.99
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Wharton's New York society polices desire the same way Gatsby's world does, but the outsider here is already inside, quietly straining against its rules instead of buying his way in.
£1.99
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald returns to the same glittering, doomed expatriate world of money and self-invention, but traces a marriage's slow collapse instead of one man's single obsessive summer.
£1.99
About the book
Out across the dark water a single green light burns at the end of a dock, and on the lawn opposite a man stands alone, arms stretched toward it, trembling. Jay Gatsby throws enormous parties for hundreds of strangers and drifts through none of them; the whole gold-lit machine exists to summon back one woman he loved in Louisville five years gone, who married old money while he was away at the war. The wonder of the book is that Gatsby chases not a future but a past already polished past anything the living Daisy could ever be, and Fitzgerald sees clean through to the ruin in it: Tom and Daisy are careless people who break things and retreat into their wealth, and the green light was never a place to arrive at, only a direction to keep facing. And then there are the sentences. Read the last page aloud, feel the current take you, boats borne back ceaselessly into the past, and try to set the book down.