検索キーワード： "Charles Dickens" 都会生活

Hard Times is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirizes the social and economic conditions of the era. Hard Times is unusual in several ways. It is by far the shortest of Dickens's novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before and after it. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London. Instead, the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town.

Step back into the streets of Victorian London, as the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce brings together a strange group of people, including Ada Clare and Richard Carstone who are at the heart of the legal battle, orphan Jo and Inspector Bucket. Oscar-winning actor Sir John Gielgud transports you to the criminal slums of the poor and the drawing rooms of the rich in Dickens’ riveting portrayal of a corrupt society.

2011, Syria. The Arab Spring is underway, and after a wave of peaceful protests, President Assad agrees to a release of political prisoners. Freed after 30 years, Dr Mahmoud is taken in by Taghreed and Emad Daffar, and brought to England by his old friend Jarvis Lorry and the daughter he has never met, foreign correspondent Lina. But his years of suffering have left him a broken man. Back in London, Jarvis convinces his nephew Sid Carton, a feckless but brilliant barrister, to defend a young Syrian émigré doctor, Shwan Dahkurdi, against charges of supporting terrorism.