The Pearl

When Kino, a poor Mexican pearl-diver, finds a magnificent pearl – ‘the Pearl of the World’ – he believes that all his dreams can come true. He will marry his wife in the church, wearing fine new clothes; their infant son will never want for anything – least of all the medicine so recently denied to him – and the boy might one day go to school, learn to read and write. But Kino’s vision of a bright future blinds him to the greed and fear the pearl arouses in his neighbours and in himself, and his shining dream begins to blacken and twist … John Steinbeck’s timeless tale of wealth and the evil it can bring is powerfully illustrated by José Clemente Orozco.