A Tale of Two Cities

About the book

A message carried between London and Paris begins the recovery of a man who has spent years in prison. Around Doctor Manette and his daughter Lucie, Dickens gathers people whose lives seem distant from one another until old secrets and new political pressures bring them together. The story moves between English courtrooms, quiet domestic rooms, French streets, and the institutions of revolutionary punishment. Its suspense grows from the uneasy relation between personal responsibility and inherited injustice. Dickens makes the suffering produced by aristocratic power vivid without treating collective vengeance as a simple cure. Doubling, recurring images, and sudden recognitions give this historical novel its distinctive rhythm, while intimate acts of loyalty ask what one person can preserve in a time of upheaval.

• Revolution and justice
• Memory
• Personal loyalty

Why read it

For historical suspense in which the smallest personal obligations acquire extraordinary weight.

English text