Orlando

What an incredibly creative story. This is my third book by Virginia Woolf, and she really is a great writer. (But a tortured soul.) 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Woolf’s words invariably dance across her pages with an enthusiasm that engenders delight. None of her books is more joyful than Orlando, a mock-biography that follows the fortunes of its protagonist across four centuries, from the era of Elizabeth I to the stroke of midnight on the eleventh of October, 1928. Orlando grows up as a young nobleman in thrall to love and literature, travels as an ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople, returns to the England of Pope and Dryden, and enters and exits the Victorian era, having achieved in the end the ripe old age of thirty. Traversing more than the borders of nations and centuries, Orlando is transformed along the way from hero to heroine, a willing victim of the author’s exuberant invention as Woolf engages, with playful abandon, themes of gender, biography, writing, and desire. Written in tribute to her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s biographical fantasy is a delicious celebration of the exhilarating powers of infatuation and imagination.