a book

A Tale of Two Cities

Name: A Tale of Two Cities
Rating: 5 (16 reviews)
Author: Charles Dickens
ISBN: 9780486406510

Charles Dickens · 2003 · 293 pages

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil lanes of London, they are all drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror and soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.

recommended by 16 people

sourced from public statements

Elizabeth Warren
“‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’ Yeah, I know we all learned it in high school, but even now, when the world seems runaway, I recite the beginning of the sentence and think of upheaval, the French Revolution, love and sacrifice – and it all seems more manageable.”↗
Maya Angelou
“Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.”↗
Dean Koontz
“Both cities in this classic are portrayed with Dickens’s talent for detail. His Paris in revolution is chilling. Madame Defarge is one of the great monsters of literature. The last scene and final sentence are deeply moving, as is the author’s insistence that totalitarian politics doesn’t have the power to eradicate love from the world.”↗
Amy Poehler
“When stories become iconic, you sometimes forget what made them so special in the first place. They can become the punch line to a joke. But A Tale of Two Cities not only has the best first line ever written—’It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’—it’s got everything! The novel has wine, guillotines, revolution! It has the storming of the Bastille! It has Madame Defarge, one of the best villains in any literary novel. At the end, it’s got a little romantic switcheroo: One man stands in the place of another and dies for the woman he loves. The first line is fitting right now. It’s a very have and have-not time. It’s certainly the most hopeful period for our country but also a very bleak one for a lot of people.”↗
Chris Pine
“I love Dickens. I read Bleak House when I was like 14, and it always stayed with me. I hadn’t read Dickens since. And Tale of Two Cities I thought was going to be some giant book—which it’s actually not. He’s the master of the run-on sentence and the parenthetical, but also, he’s so fucking funny—still. Just like Mark Twain. But also, Tale of Two Cities is so relevant to America right now. I think we all need to read this book, because this is about how revolutions happen and how ugly they are. What happens when the middle class dies.”↗
Dan Snow
“Today in 1859 the final instalment of Dickens' 'Tale of Two Cities' was published. One of the best selling books of all time. I was once lucky enough to hold a first edition.”↗
Oprah Winfrey
J. K. Rowling
Christopher Hitchens
Mahatma Gandhi
Amelia Boone
George R. R. Martin
Sanjay Gupta
May Witwit
Muhammad Yunus
Antonio Villaraigosa