Revenge : A Novel

A brilliant recasting of the classic story The Count of Monte Cristo, Revenge centers on Ned Maddstone, a happy, charismatic, Oxford-bound seventeen-year-old whose rosy future is virtually preordained. Handsome, confident, and talented, newly in love with bright, beautiful Portia, his father an influential MP, Ned leads a charmed life. But privilege makes him an easy target for envy, and in the course of one day Ned's path is changed forever. A promise made to a dying teacher combined with a prank devised by a jealous classmate mutates bewilderingly into a case of mistaken arrest and incarceration. Ned finds himself a political prisoner in a nightmarish exile that lasts years, before a fellow inmate reawakens Ned's intellect and resurrects his will to live. The chilling consequences of Ned's recovery are felt worldwide.