As the Revolution is still raging in France, in London the barrister Sydney Carton and the exiled French nobleman Charles Darnay find themselves rivals for the affections of Lucie Manette, the daughter of a political prisoner who was released from the Bastille and moved to the English capital. Through a chain of events, they both end up in Paris, where they are caught up in the anarchic forces of the Terror and find themselves facing 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 major world events on the personal lives of people on both sides of the Channel.
