A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." So begins one of the nineteenth century's enduring masterpieces, set amid the terror of revolutionary Paris and the relative safety of Georgian London. Traveling to England under the assumed name of Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat abandons his country. He is disgusted by the greed of the ancien regime, which feeds itself while the masses starve. Years later, the promise of a democratic revolution gives him reason to hope, and he returns to France to find that the new order is as contemptible as the old. Now Darnay must rescue his wife and father–in–law from blood thirsty mobs and the guillotine. But will his unpredictable look–alike, Sydney Carton, destroy his chances? Or does Carton have something else in mind?