The Count of Monte Cristo

On the day he is to be made captain and married to his beloved Mercédès, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is denounced as a traitor by men who envy his happiness. Without trial, he is buried in the island fortress of the Château d'If, where fourteen years of imprisonment nearly break him — until a fellow prisoner, the learned Abbé Faria, gives him an education, a plan of escape, and the secret of a vast treasure hidden on the isle of Monte Cristo.

Free and immensely rich, Dantès reinvents himself as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo and returns to a society that long ago left him for dead. Patient, brilliant, and seemingly all-knowing, he works his way into the lives of the three men who destroyed him, orchestrating an intricate reckoning that will test how far justice can be pushed before it curdles into revenge.

One of the great adventure novels of the nineteenth century, The Count of Monte Cristo is a sweeping tale of betrayal, endurance, disguise, and retribution — and a meditation on whether any man has the right to play the hand of Providence.