Way of All Flesh - Samuel Butler, Penguin

Written with great humour, irony and honesty,&amp,nbsp,The Way of All Flesh&amp,nbsp,exploded perceptions of the Victorian middle-class family in its radical depiction of Ernest Pontifex, a young man who casts off his background and discovers himself.&amp,nbsp,The awkward but likeable son of a tyrannical clergyman and a priggish mother, and destined to follow his father into the church, Ernest gleefully rejects his parents' respectability, and chooses instead to find his own way in the world.