The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

'Who has not Tristram Shandy read? Is any mortal so ill bred?' So wrote the young James Boswell in the spring of 1760, when Sterne's comic novel was received with extravagant popular acclaim and some bewilderment. Indeed, how can one describe a novel whose hero-narrator fails in the first two volumes even to get himself born? A narrator who, in a series of digressions he calls the 'sunshine' of reading, interests us instead in such characters as his uncle Toby, a devotee of wargames in the garden, or Parson Yorick, a self-portrait of the author? The text of this Oxford World's Classics edition is based on the first editions of all nine volumes. No unnecessary modernization has obscured Sterne's idiosyncratic presentation of the novel.