The History of Mr. Polly
1910
Alfred Polly has spent fifteen years selling waistcoats to men who don't want them, listening to his wife's endless complaints, and watching his modest ambitions curdle into quiet desperation. His shop is failing. His digestion is worse. And the suffocating sameness of everything has finally become unbearable. So Mr. Polly makes a plan: douse the shop in paraffin, strike a match, and end it all. But the universe, it turns out, has a sense of humor. A stranger appears at the crucial moment, and Mr. Polly does something he never expected - he saves a life. Then, with the desperate ingenuity of a man who has nothing left to lose, he stages his own death and walks away from everything he once called his life. H.G. Wells wrote this strange, sad, wildly funny novel in 1910, and it remains one of the most unlikely redemption stories in English literature. Part dark comedy, part philosophical puzzler about whether any of us can truly escape the lives we've built - or whether we should even try.
