History of Mr. Polly

Alfred Polly has been asleep for ten years, and he's just realized it. A mild-mannered hardware shopkeeper in a forgettable seaside town, he sells nails and paint to customers he secretly despises, lives in a house that feels like a coffin, and is married to a woman whose nagging has become the background noise of his existence. His shop is failing. His dreams have withered. And then, one luminous afternoon, Mr. Polly decides to stop performing the role of a contented man. What follows is either a midlife crisis or the first honest thing he's ever done. Mr. Polly fakes his own death and walks away from everything: the shop, the wife, the entire exhausting architecture of respectable poverty he'd inherited like a disease. Wells, drawing on his own roots as a draper's apprentice's son, gives us a comic masterpiece about the prison of lower-middle-class English life, where ambition dies behind a counter and "getting on" becomes its own kind of damnation. The humor is sharp, the melancholy is real, and the portrait of a man who simply refuses to be ordinary anymore feels as relevant now as it did a century ago. For readers who love comic novels with teeth, for anyone who has ever felt the walls close in on a life that looked fine from the outside.