GenevaBookClub: After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.

GenevaBookClub: The longest and most charming love letter in literature’, an homage to Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. The novel spans across three different setups in three different centuries: 18th century England, where Orlando is a young nobleman, 18th century Constantinople, where Orlando, an ambassador, awakes to find they are a woman, and 1928 England, the year of suffrage for women, when Orlando has married and had children, with new hopes for the future of women. Part satire, part stream-of-consciousness, part adventure novel, part psychoanalysis of a character Virginia Woolf admired. Readers hail it for the beautiful prose, combining old and new forms of aesthetic, the traditional East-West cultural crossings, and its discourse on gender across time. The novel has been adapted numerous times, most famously in a film, with Tilda Swindon taking on the lead role (1992), and most recently, as an opera at the Vienna State Opera, in December 2019.