"The story opens when an unemployed farmhand, Michael Henchard, sells his wife, Susan, and daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, while in a drunken stupor at a fair, for five guineas to a sailor called Newson. On sobering up the following day, Henchard is filled with remorse, swears a twenty year abstinence from alcohol and begins a search for his family. Eighteen years later the reformed Henchard has become the mayor of Casterbridge, but his past is set to haunt him and tragedy to dog him. Thus the scene is set for an epic tale of human weakness and resolution, despair and conflict, disappearance and reappearance, as both economic and emotional fortunes rise and fall against the backdrop of the Wessex Hardy loved and wrote about so powerfully."--Jacket
