When you find out that your favorite modern novelist has written her own new fantasy take on your all-time favorite novel, at first you feel elated. Then you feel nervous. (Or at least I do.) Of course she’ll nail it—right? She’s a wonderful writer—but it’s a formidable task …
Turns out I needn’t have worried. A Far Better Thing, H. G. Parry’s version of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, is everything I could have asked for, and then some.
A Far Better Thing is one of those takeoffs that makes you both love it for itself, and love the book it’s based on even more than you already did.
If you know Dickens’s original novel, then you know—and probably love—the character of Sydney Carton, the hard-drinking lawyer lurking in the story’s background who eventually steps up to become the unlikeliest of heroes. In Parry’s novel, Sydney is our narrator, but the story he tells stretches into a supernatural dimension. In this version, Sydney was abducted by fairies as a very young child; as an adult he has been sent back to the human world and forced to act as the fairies’ servant there, catering to whims that are often capricious or outright cruel. And Charles Darnay, the French aristocrat in exile who looks uncannily like Sydney, is his changeling.
Parry thus takes on the job of retelling Dickens’s French revolution story while simultaneously building her own new story around it. She skillfully weaves together the strands of the two worlds, taking elements large and small from Dickens (like Sydney’s nickname of “Memory”) and giving them a new significance in her own story.
As in Dickens’s novel, Sydney feels pretty bitter about the man who looks just like him but has all the luck he’s never had—yet Sydney nonetheless thwarts a formidable fairy’s purposes by saving Charles Darnay’s life when the latter is tried for espionage. At the same time, Sydney finds himself irresistibly drawn to Lucie Manette, the woman Charles loves—who is herself the changeling of someone Sydney once loved and lost.
The suspense builds as Sydney tries to find ways to strike back against the fairies’ tyranny, and the emotional tension keeps pace as he slowly comes to realize that he loves Lucie for herself, not just because she’s so like the girl he loved when he was a boy.
Charles Dickens brilliantly used the technique of never fully letting us into Sydney’s mind to help make him the intriguing figure he is. Parry, by taking the opposite tack and making Sydney her first-person narrator, makes him intriguing in a whole new way. We’re privy to the fierce intelligence, raw emotion, and shrewd strategizing abilities behind the morose facade. Moreover, we’re privy to the secret world that this Sydney knows, where stage magicians dabble in forces too powerful to control, and tricksters make dangerous deals that threaten not just individuals but entire nations, all while normal humans go on about their lives unaware. This revamped story is complicated, intricate, and absolutely sublime.
A Far Better Thing is one of those takeoffs that makes you both love it for itself, and love the book it’s based on even more than you already did. I spent days lingering over the final pages because it was so good that I didn’t want it to end. I can’t praise a book any more highly than that.
This review was originally published on Dear, Strange Things on June 8, 2025. Republished here with the author’s permission.
