Amazon.com description: Product Description: Michael Henchard, Mayor of Casterbridge, is perhaps the greatest of all British author Thomas Hardy s character-creations. As a young man with nothing to lose he sells his wife & child in a fairground auction. Later in life, when he has risen to be mayor & a well-to-do corn-merchant, his past rises up to destroy him. Essentially this is the story of a personal tragedy -- of the rise & fall of a single man, undone by his faults of character & the changing conditions of rural commerce. His struggles against his society & his guilty past have a truly heroic grandeur. This edition includes an in-depth introduction to Thomas Hardy & this novel by Ian Gregor.