Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900)

Eight hundred pilgrims sleep below deck on a steamer crossing the Indian Ocean when something underwater strikes the hull, and a rusted bulkhead begins to bulge against the sea. Jim is the young first mate who has rehearsed heroism his whole life in daydreams, and in the one moment it is asked of him for real, his body jumps into a lifeboat without him. The ship does not sink. He is left alive, stripped of his certificate, a coward by one leap he can never take back, and Conrad, who first went to sea at sixteen, knew the unbearable thing this book knows: that you are not the brave figure of your own imagining, only the person you were in the second your body chose for you. Marlow narrates in long, circling sentences that close on Jim from every angle and never quite hold him. He flees east to a river settlement that crowns him Lord and offers a second chance to prove what he is. You read on dreading, and half hoping, the moment it comes for him again.