The Three Musketeers - Tapa dura

"Massive, funny, moving, exhaustingly gripping: a melodrama, a revenge drama and, literally, bodice-ripping" (Adam Thirlwell 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" (Victor Hugo)

All for one, and one for all!

Four men – the young Gascon D’Artagnan and the legendary musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis - are ready to sacrifice everything, from their purses to their lives, for the common good. Propelled by the wicked machinations of Cardinal Richelieu and the magnetic Milady de Winter, the devoted friends adventure across seas and over rooftops, from masked balls to a medieval prison, to defend the honour of the Queen and the life of the King.

Dashing, knockabout, romantic, violent, tongue-in-cheek, chilling and tragic, The Three Musketeers is a wonderful piece of storytelling.