A new translation picking up twenty years after the conclusion of The Three Musketeers and continuing the adventures of the valiant d’Artagnan and his three loyal friends
The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas’s most famous and enduring novel, completed its serial publication in the summer of 1844, and by the time of its book publication at the end of that year, readers were already demanding a sequel. They got it starting in January 1845, when the first chapters of Twenty Years After began to appear―but it wasn’t quite what they were expecting.
When Twenty Years After opens it is 1648: the Red Sphinx, Cardinal Richelieu, is dead, France is ruled by a regency in the grip of civil war, and across the English Channel the monarchy of King Charles I hangs by a thread. As d’Artagnan will find, these are problems that can’t be solved with a sword thrust. In Twenty Years After, the musketeers confront maturity and face its greatest challenge: sometimes, you fail. It’s in how the four comrades respond to failure, and rise above it, that we begin to see the true characters of Dumas’s great heroes.
A true literary achievement, Twenty Years After is long overdue for a modern reassessment―and a new translation. As an added inducement, Lawrence Ellsworth has discovered a “lost” chapter that was overlooked in the novel’s original publication, and is included in none of the available English translations to date―until now.
Dumas’s rousing sequel to The Three Musketeers continues in Blood Royal, the second half of what Dumas originally published as Twenty Years After.
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"Not the best of Dumas writing. I found it somewhat unengaging and characters distant, compared to the brilliant Three Musketeers novel. The reader is excellent, a pleasure to listen to really. "
— mashamarx (4 out of 5 stars)
Good fun!”
— Sunday Telegraph (London)“Dumas never stints the action, witty dialogue, and surprising plot developments. As gradually grows clear, his overriding theme is loyalty—to friends, family and party but, above all, to living by a principled code of honor in a debased and chaotic world. If you only know The Three Musketeers, you owe yourself the pleasure of spending some happy evenings with Twenty Years After. Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan may be older and their hair starting to gray, but they’ve lost none of their romance and grandeur.”
— Washington PostBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), French novelist and playwright, was one of the most famous and prolific French writers of the nineteenth century, producing some 250 books. He is best known for his historical novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, and he was among the first authors to fully exploit the possibilities of the serial novel. He is credited with revitalizing the historical novel in France. His riveting, fast-paced adventure tales that blend history and fiction have been adapted into nearly 200 films. His last unfinished last novel, The Last Cavalier, lost to historians for 125 years, was completed in 2005 and quickly became a best seller.
John Lee is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He has twice won acclaim as AudioFile’s Best Voice in Fiction & Classics. He also narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays. He is an accomplished stage actor and has written and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit. He played Alydon in the 1963–64 Doctor Who serial The Daleks.