Little Dorrit (THE GREAT CLASSICS LIBRARY)

A financial scandal straight out of today's headlines makes this tale as relevant as Trollope's "The Way We Live Now", but this novel is rich too with Dickens' own experience of debtor's prison and withering satire of implacable bureaucracy. The incidental characters - Doyce, the computer nerd of his time, Pancks, the walking lesson in not judging by appearances, the chillingly ambivalent Miss Wade - linger as hauntingly as the fragile yet indomitable Amy Dorrit.