Return of the Native

The heath is ancient. It was here before Rome, before England, and it will be here when both are forgotten. Into this landscape of gorse and granite walks Clym Yeobright, returning from Paris with dreams of a simple life among the people he loves. What he finds instead is Eustacia: his cousin's wife in name only, a woman whose beauty is matched only by her restlessness, whose hunger for something more than this life can offer burns like a signal fire on the moor. They are wrong for each other, and they know it, and they cannot help themselves. Around them, others are pulled into their orbit like moths to a destructive flame. What follows is a tragedy in the oldest sense: not mere unhappiness, but the slow, terrible working-out of characters against fate, against nature, against their own natures. Hardy's vision is merciless. His prose is operatic. This is a novel that asks whether we are free or merely puppets in a play written long before we were born. It does not answer. It does not need to.