Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe came out in April 1719 as the true story of a mariner of York who had lived twenty-eight years alone on an island near the mouth of the Orinoco, and many of its first readers believed it. Defoe was nearly sixty and had never been shipwrecked. What he invented was a novel made of ordinary things: how a man with a knife, a gun and whatever he can carry off a wreck builds a wall, grows barley, keeps a calendar on a post, and loses and finds his God. Then one day on the shore, a single footprint. Twenty chapters, one a day, from the day he was cast ashore.

Read one big book alongside other readers, a day at a time. Cohorts set off on the date above.