The greatest storyteller of the nineteenth century, in a single volume.
No one has ever matched Alexandre Dumas for sheer narrative momentum — the duels, the disguises, the prison escapes, the patient revenge served across decades, the friendships that outlast kings. He wrote faster and better than seemed humanly possible, and the world has never stopped reading him. This volume gathers his greatest novels into one definitive library.
THE D’ARTAGNAN ROMANCES — the complete saga. It begins with THE THREE MUSKETEERS, the most famous adventure novel ever written: a young Gascon arrives in Paris with nothing but a sword and his nerve, and falls in with Athos, Porthos, and Aramis — “all for one, and one for all.” The story continues through TWENTY YEARS AFTER and the vast VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE, ending with THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK — the four friends, older now, on opposite sides of a secret that could topple the throne of France. Few sagas in literature have ever been loved this long, or this hard.
THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO — the perfect revenge novel. Betrayed by his friends, imprisoned without trial in the island fortress of the Château d’If, Edmond Dantès escapes after fourteen years to reinvent himself as the mysterious, fabulously wealthy Count of Monte Cristo — and to deliver a vengeance so patient, so total, that it has defined the form ever since.
THE VALOIS ROMANCES — passion and bloodshed at the French court. MARGUERITE DE VALOIS and its sequels plunge into the Wars of Religion, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, poison, intrigue, and doomed love — Dumas at his darkest and most operatic.
Together, these are the books that taught the modern world what an adventure novel could be — and that every swashbuckler since has been chasing.
This Annotated edition includes:
The complete texts of Dumas’s major novels in classic English translation, in one volumeA critical introduction on Dumas, his collaborator Auguste Maquet, and the making of the great romancesA biographical portrait of Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870)The reading order of the connected sagasFor readers who want the whole sweep of Dumas in one place — and for anyone meeting d’Artagnan, Edmond Dantès, and the court of the Valois for the first time.
