The Return of Tarzan

From the salons of Paris the book moves to the moonlit deserts of Algeria, goatskin tents glowing on yellow sand, "a phantom paradise upon a phantom sea," and at last to the jungle of Tarzan's birth. Edgar Rice Burroughs writes him as two men at once: the composed Parisian gentleman who lets a duelist fire on him without lifting his own pistol, and the primal creature whose thin veneer of civilization can fall away like a brittle shell. Around him move the vengeful conspirator Rokoff, always in a new disguise, and the loyal Frenchman D'Arnot, who carries hard news. And there is Jane Porter, bound to a marriage she does not want yet drawn to the man she believes dead.

It is adventure told with a full heart — duels and ambushes, a lion killed with a knife, a lost city of gold, and a hero torn between two lives that cannot easily be reconciled. There is a moment when the narrator pauses over Tarzan's savage coronation to picture his civilized friends confronting this transformed king, and in that pause the book stops to weigh what that freedom costs. For a reader who has ever felt caught between who they are and where they belong, the door stands open here.