It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In the years leading to the French Revolution, London and Paris burn with parallel furies, one decadent, one deadly. Dr. Alexandre Manette, a physician imprisoned in the Bastille for eighteen years, is finally "recalled to life" and reunited in London with his daughter Lucie, a woman whose gentle love becomes the thread that binds together fates both noble and damned. Against this backdrop of revolutionary fury, two men fall for Lucie: Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who abhors his own bloodline, and Sydney Carton, a brilliant alcoholic whose wasted genius masks a capacity for extraordinary sacrifice. As the guillotine rises in Paris and Madame Defarge knits her registry of the condemned, Dickens weaves personal redemption through political catastrophe, asking what price is paid when societies tear themselves apart, and whether one life can purchase another's salvation.
