In the Library
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens, 1859
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 3
- Length
- Length 136k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Les Misérables does the same thing, but stretches its redemption arc across decades of Parisian upheaval instead of a single climactic afternoon at the scaffold.
£1.99
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Great Expectations does the same thing, but trades the guillotine for a quieter ruin: a gifted man slowly learning what he owes the people who love him.
£1.99
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Dantes, like Doctor Manette, is buried for years in a fortress prison by powerful men guarding a secret, and Dumas turns his return to the world into a long, glittering revenge.
£1.99
About the book
A wine cask breaks open in a Paris street and the poor of Saint Antoine drop to their knees to drink from the gutter, staining their hands and mouths the color of what the city is about to become. Charles Dickens sets that stain against Sydney Carton, a brilliant, dissolute lawyer who has wasted every gift he was given and loves a woman, Lucie Manette, who will marry another man and never love him in return. Carton and that other man share a face, and when the Terror comes for an innocent life and the guillotine wants a name, Carton uses the resemblance to buy back, in a single afternoon, everything he never made of himself. Dickens sends him to the scaffold certain of one thing: that this, at last, is a far better thing than anything he has ever done, and that certainty is the most beautiful sentence in a book built out of blood.