Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Orlando begins his life as a privileged nobleman of the Elizabethan age. He meets Queen Elizabeth, consorts with princesses and poets, falls in love, falls out of love – you know, the usual things dukes do.

Then – rather strangely – Orlando suddenly turns into a woman. Then, perhaps more strangely, he/she goes on to live for 300 years, surviving through Jane Austen’s times, the Victorian age, and right on into the Roaring 20’s.

Sounds odd? Well, it is. But the book is also laugh-out-loud funny and incredibly thought-provoking. Virginia Woolf uses her “biography” of Orlando’s life to take on all sorts of interesting questions about love, life, and the war of the sexes with her signature wry wit. Orlando is a bizarre classic, but a classic all the same.