The Three Musketeers

Description

'God's teeth!' Unfailingly exciting and a complete joy to read, this new translation of The Three Musketeers is published to coincide with the lavish BBC adaptation to be aired this month. The young D'Artagnan and the legendary musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis are 'the inseparables' - ready to sacrifice everything in a duel or game of dice in order to defend their honour or that of the King and Queen of France. Handsome and hot-tempered, they dive into raging battles or back-street conspiracies with gusto, especially if by their daring deeds they can thwart the wicked devices of their arch-enemy, Cardinal Richelieu, and his mysterious accomplice, Milady de Winter. All for one, and one for all!

Alexandre Dumas was a French playwright, historian and prolific novelist, penning a string of successful books including The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), and Twenty Years After(1845). His novels have been translated into a hundred different languages and inspired over two hundred films. In his day Dumas was as famous for his financial irresponsibility and flamboyant lifestyle as for his writing. Dumas died in 1870.

Massive, funny, moving, exhaustingly gripping: a melodrama, a revenge drama and, literally, bodice-ripping * Independent on Sunday * There was nobody quicker than Dumas. There were few better. Dumas stands proudly in the pantheon of 19th-century greats. He deserves to be regarded alongside Dickens and Tolstoy as an influential, enduring writer * Glasgow Herald * Dumas's novels are shameless word-guzzlers, big and plush and almost sinfully comfortable... If Dumas was a hack, he was a hack with genius. His storytelling never seems the least bit mechanical: no assembly line, then or now, could ever turn out a narrative as joyful, as eccentric, as maddeningly human as The Three Musketeers * New York Times * [Dumas's books] are fast-moving page-turners; vivid, bombastic and irresistible, with their unforgettable characters and flamboyant splatter of French history * Irish Times * The most popular man of the century... More than French...European; more than European...universal