TAP Classics
1 total work
Artist Basil Hallward is irresistibly drawn to the Adonis-like Dorian Gray, the subject of his latest painting. Lord Henry Wotton, Basil's louche, decadent friend, is equally taken with the exquisite model, and dangles before Dorian the tantalizing prospect of eternal youth and beauty, a life governed by sensory pleasure. While Dorian descends into a cesspit of hedonistic excess, the ugliness of his sins is etched upon the painting. But as the years pass, the bill for corruption and debauchery mounts, one that cannot be settled merely by an increasingly disfigured canvas. Oscar Wilde's only novel is a dark, Faustian fable of wish fulfilment that leads to an inescapable day of reckoning.