Bleak House

A lawsuit over an inheritance has been running so long that nobody alive remembers what it is about, and the fog outside the Court of Chancery is described in the first pages as though it were a legal substance. Dickens alternates between a third-person narrator who circles the case and Esther Summerson, who tells her own story plainly and without knowing what it means.

The novel is often praised for its attack on the courts, but its real subject is care: who takes responsibility for children, for the poor, for the sick. Inspector Bucket, one of the first detectives in English fiction, is a small part of a very large book. Read it slowly; the plot is a machine for distributing blame.