Moll Flanders

These are the fortunes and misfortunes of Moll Flanders: born in Newgate Prison, twelve years a prostitute, five times a wife (once to her own brother), twelve years a thief and eight years a transported felon in Her Majesty's colony of Virginia. Daniel Defoe's rollicking tale presents life in the prisons, alleyways and underworlds of eighteenth-century London, and gives us Moll - scandalous, unscrupulous and utterly irresistible.

The tale is the more compelling because (Moll) is looking back ruefully on her misadventures in older age, examining her own motives with withering candour, It's still fresh, centuries on. It's raunchy yet humane, brilliantly written yet not at the expense of a fast-paced plot, and it conjures such a vivid picture of its age that it would certainly transport me off the monotony of a desert island.I've always loved Moll herself she's so feisty. All the dreadful things that befall her and she just picks herself up, dusts herself down, rearranges her cleavage and rampages off again., Bold, beautiful and brilliantly resourceful, Moll was ideally qualified to be the heroine of one of the first English novels... Defoe conveys very forcefully that wit, courage and enterprise are valuable attributes for a woman, Enduringly colourful, The raciest of memoirs

Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660. He worked briefly as a hosiery merchant, then as an intelligence agent and political writer. His writings resulted in his imprisonment on several occasions, and earned him powerful friends and enemies. During his lifetime Defoe wrote over two hundred and fifty books, pamphlets and journals and travelled widely in both Europe and the British Isles. Among his most famous works are Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Though Defoe was nearly sixty before he began writing fiction, his work is so fundamental to the development of the novel that he is often cited as the first true English novelist. He is also regarded as a founding father of modern journalism and one of the earliest travel writers. Daniel Defoe died in April 1731.