David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

Send a boy to paste labels in a riverside warehouse, let him go hungry among strangers and learn the exact price of a loaf, and you have the wound at the heart of _David Copperfield_, the one Dickens carried all his life and handed, barely disguised, to the narrator he loved most. The grown David tells the story looking back, so the boy's blind faith in Steerforth, the charming school friend who will cost him everything, aches with what the man already knows. And what people he gives you along the way: Mr. Micawber forever waiting, against all evidence, for something to turn up; Uriah Heep writhing in his oily false humility; Dora, the child-wife adored too completely to be seen clearly; Agnes, steady at his side across the years. Dickens draws every one of them with a tenderness that never once softens the truth. The book opens wondering whether David will be the hero of his own life, and answers by letting you live that life beside him.