The Count of Monte Cristo

What follows is a long descent. A jealous colleague, a lovestruck rival, an ambitious prosecutor who would rather bury an innocent man than risk his own career. Each plays a part, and Dantès disappears into the Château d'If, the island fortress from which no living man returns. There, in the dark, he meets the old Abbé Faria, gaunt and bearded and astonishing in his learning, who offers him something more dangerous than freedom: a reason to want it, and the secret of a fortune hidden on a lonely island.

Then the novel does what few dare: it lets the wronged man come back. Enriched beyond reckoning, unrecognizable, moving through the drawing rooms of Paris under a name that arrives as rumor before it arrives as flesh, the Count of Monte Cristo sets in motion a reckoning built with the patience of years. "I wish to be Providence myself," he says — and the novel turns on the terrible question of whether any man should.

It is a book of black seas and torchlit fortresses, of gold falling through fingers like hail, of veiled witnesses and diamonds that draw every eye and a slow, deliberate justice. Long, yes, and generous the way only a truly full story can be. It gives the reader betrayal and patience, cruelty and mercy, and holds them together until the very last page.