The Wrong Box

About this book

A delightfully macabre farce, The Wrong Box finds Robert Louis Stevenson turning his gift for crisp dialogue and sly satire toward a bitterly comic inheritance plot: two brothers bound by a tontine that will bestow a fortune on the last survivor. What follows is a spiraling chain of miscommunications, bungled schemes, eccentric characters and escalating absurdities—each mishap more uproarious and unsettling than the last—so that bemusement and unease sit side by side. Witty, fast-moving and unexpectedly modern in its observations about greed, mortality and social pretensions, this compact novel keeps you laughing even as it probes the darker impulses behind human self-interest.