The Great Gatsby - F. Scott. Fitzgerald

Baz Luhrman’s spectacular re-make of The Great Gatsby, due for release on Boxing Day, provides the perfect opportunity to (re)discover a literary classic. Often lauded as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s finest work, the American writer set out to compose a "consciously artistic” piece of work and Gatsby turned out to be, in his own words, the “sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world". Radiant indeed was the world of New York during the ‘Roaring Twenties’ in which our narrator, Nick Carraway, finds himself as a young Yale graduate working in the city and living out at West Egg, a peaceful, well-to-do commuter town.

Nick becomes ensconced in the tennis playing, all day drinking, shallow partying culture of the millionaire East and West Egg sets through a tenuous family link to Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is in a traditionally unhappy marriage to Tom but her historic links to Nick’s ostentatious yet mysterious neighbour, Gastby, slowly come to light.

Fitzgerald’s plot enjoys the trappings of the gaudy deviance of the era, with multiple mistresses running around and decadence dripping from every setting.  The skilled writer expertly holds back Gatsby’s character, switching between obvious support for the entrepreneurial war veteran and cynical disdain for the suspected petty criminal. 

Readers aren’t patronised with clear, directional plot revelations, leaving you to piece together the mess that is the lives of his chic, bed-hopping group of characters. 

A glittering, accessible classic.