After spending eighteen years as a prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is eventually 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 brilliant but dissolute English lawyer—become deeply connected through their love for Lucie Manette. From the peaceful streets of London, they are unwillingly pulled into the violent and chaotic world of Paris during the Reign of Terror, where they live under the constant threat of the guillotine.