Purporting to be an autobiography of the antihero Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Sterne's novel is a comic masterpiece of digression, egoism and sensationalism, as its hilarious asides, explanations and host of memorable secondary characters such as Uncle Toby, Dr Slop, Parson Yorick and Widow Wadman take centre stage, at the expense of the actual life events the book sets out to depict.
A humorous compendium of European thought and literature pastiching the likes of Locke and Bacon and referencing Pope, Swift, Cervantes and Rabelais emerges amid the convoluted accounts of Tristram's conception, misnaming and accidental circumcision by a sash window, in a shrewd narrative that examines the role and nature of language itself.