A Tale of Two Cities

by Charles Dickens

First published 1859

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4.3(35,244)

After eighteen years of imprisonment in the Bastille, Doctor Alexandre Manette is reunited with his daughter Lucie and begins a new life in London. Lucie marries the French émigré Charles Darnay, who has rejected his aristocratic family’s abuses, while the disillusioned English lawyer Sydney Carton recognises in her family a purpose missing from his own life.

As the French Revolution moves from the fall of the Bastille to the Reign of Terror, Darnay returns to Paris and is imprisoned under the revolutionary regime. The Manettes, Carton and their allies confront vengeance, inherited guilt and political violence in a story that balances the injustices of the old order against the dehumanising force of revolutionary terror.