Warning spoilers can and will be found throughout this text :)
The book which I will review today is in fact a play. One of the great classical plays: Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. Even among his contemporaries this was considered his greatest play.
If now you are wondering why you should read a play over 2000 years old, the reason is that it is the source of the expression: Oedipus Complex. If you ever want to use that expression and know where it came from, here's your chance.
Seeing as how this is obviously a document from the puic domain, you cand find a link to a version below.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31 (This file also contains two other plays. The one you are looking for is Oedipus king)
The book tells the story of a king.
He has only recently become king, having fled his ancestral town, for fear of fulfilling a prophecy which stated that he would kill his father. Having arrived in the new town, he married the recently widowed queen.
The book starts when years ater the people of the town claim that all kinds of ill befall them, and the reason is that the murderer of the last king goes unpunished. Oedipus asks for a seeer to come, who tells what has happened. His description of the facts is ill-received by the king. Than the story starts to unfold, eventually proving the seeer right.
It is a very important insight in the psychology of the antiques: The story of Oedipus is a story of multiple people being prophesied a calamity, and although they take very arguing measures to avoid that calamity, in the end the calamity takes place. Your fate is decided, and there's nothing you can do about it.
It's a short story (it's a play,so you'll read through it in little over an hour.