Against the backdrop of growing discontent in Paris, Doctor Manette is
released from the Bastille after eighteen years of unjust imprisonment
and begins a new life in England with his devoted daughter Lucie. There,
the gifted but dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton and the exiled French
nobleman Charles Darnay find their lives increasingly intertwined with
those of the Manettes. Yet soon both men are drawn ineluctably from the
peaceful English capital to the horror and bloodshed of the Paris Terror
and the looming threat of the guillotine.
Representing a departure from the social satire of most of his other
novels and deemed by Dickens himself to be "the best story I have
written", A Tale of Two Cities is a powerful historical novel about
the repercussions of epochal events on the personal lives of people on
both sides of the Channel.