Tale of Two Cities (Version 5)
Tale of Two Cities (Version 5)
It opens with the most famous lines in English literature: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." In this revolutionary fever, Dickens weaves the fates of an English family caught between nations with the brutal story of the French peasantry rising against their oppressors. At its heart is Sydney Carton, a dissipated London lawyer whose only redeeming quality seems to be his resemblance to the noble Charles Darnay. But when the guillotines begin to fall in Paris, Carton finds something worth living for, and then dying for. This is a novel about resurrection in every sense: a doctor rescued from a living death in the Bastille, a nation reborn in blood, and a man who transforms his wasted life into an act of staggering sacrifice. Dickens captures the Terrible Year of 1793-94 in all its fury, where revolution devours its children and love survives against impossible odds. The ending still devastates, a century and a half later, because it insists that no life is beyond redemption.
X-Ray
