The story of Edmund Dantes, self-styled Count of Monte Cristo, is told with consummate skill.

The victim of a miscarriage of justice, Dantes is fired by a desire for retribution and empowered by a stroke of providence.

In his campaign of vengeance, he becomes an anonymous agent of fate. The sensational narrative of intrigue, betrayal, escape, and triumphant revenge moves at a cracking pace.

Dumas novel presents a powerful conflict between good and evil embodied in an epic saga of rich diversity that is complicated by the hero s ultimate discomfort with the hubristic implication of his own actions.

Our edition is based on the most popular and enduring translation first published by Chapman and Hall in 1846. The name of the translator was never revealed.

One of the most famous and popular writers of the nineteenth century, Alexandre Dumas was born in Villes-Cotterets in 1802.

His father, a general in Napoleon s army, was the illegitimate son of the Marquis de la Pailleterie and an Afro-Caribbean woman, Louise Cossette. After his father s death in 1806, the family lived in poverty.

Dumas was a self-educated, high-spirited youth, who loved telling stories and having affairs. At the age of twenty he obtained a position with the Duc d Orleans, later King Louis Philippe, in Paris.

He lived much in the style of his heroes, taking part in the Revolution of 1830. He caught cholera in 1832 and travelled to Italy to recuperate.

His early literary successes were a series of historical dramas followed by his greatest triumphs, The Three Musketeers (1844), Twenty Years After (1845), The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848-50), the third part of which, The Man in the Iron Mask, is the most famous.

Dumas made enormous fortunes from his writing, but throughout his life he always managed to spend more than he earned. In 1858 he travelled to Russia and then to Italy, where he was a fervent supporter of Garibaldi in the struggle for Italian independence.

He remained in Italy for four years working as a keeper of museums in Florence. On his return to Paris his debts continued to mount, as he spent his money on his friends, mistresses and other interests.

He died of a stroke in Puys, near Dieppe on December 5th, 1870.