Roderick Hudson (Penguin Classics)

Roderick Hudson, egotistical, beautiful and an exceptionally gifted sculptor, but poor, is taken from New England to Rome by Rowland Mallet, a rich man of fine appreciative sensibilities, who intends to give Roderick the scope to develop his genius. Roderick Hudson contains the obsessions that inspired all James's fiction but put across with a simple force and fire that he never quite caught again.