Introduction by John Irving • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s  The Great American Read Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations—until he is inexplicably elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters—including a terrifying convict named Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Havisham, and her beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella,  Great Expectations  is a tale of intrigue, unattainable love, and all of the happiness money can’t buy. “ Great Expectations  has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language,” according to John Irving, and J. Hillis Miller declares, “ Great Expectations  is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens’s abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero.”