The Colossus: A Novel

Henry DeGolyer cannot remember his mother's face. He knows only the cold floor of the Foundlings' Home where he was abandoned as an infant, and the cramped room where an old Italian woman taught him to read while his father drank himself into oblivion. Now a journalist scraping by in the city, Henry carries the weight of his origins like a wound that refuses to heal. When a stranger named Henry Sawyer arrives with an invitation to Costa Rica and hints of buried family secrets, Henry faces a choice that will define whatever comes after: remain the man that circumstance made him, or become the man he might choose to be. Opie Percival Read's 1893 novel traces one man's struggle to construct an identity from the fragments of a shattered childhood, moving from the grim institutions of the city to the tropical unknown. It is a period piece, certainly, with all the earnestness and sentimentalism of its era. But beneath that Victorian surface lies something that still resonates: the terror and freedom of deciding who you are when no one has given you a script.