Handsome, confident, and talented, newly in love with bright, beautiful Portia, his father an influential MP, Ned enjoys an existence of boundless opportunity. Ned Maddstone is a happy, charismatic Oxford bound seventeen year old whose rosy future is virtually preordained. A brilliant recasting of the classic story The Count of Monte Cristo, Revenge crackles with the wit and intelligence readers have come to expect from this hugely talented author, actor, and comedian, yet it reveals an intriguingly deep, much darker side of his imagination. It is, in every sense, a story of our times.Ī distinct departure from his popular comic novels, this haunting, provocative tale of wrongful imprisonment and violent retribution is Stephen Fry’s first thriller. His first book to be set mostly in America, it is a thriller with a funny streak, a futuristic fantasy based on one of mankind’s darkest realities. Fry’s experiment in history makes for his most ambitious novel yet, and his most affecting.

And with their success is launched a brave new world that is in some ways better than ours but in most ways even worse. In Making History, Fry has bitten off a rather meaty chunk by tackling an at first deceptively simple premise: What if Hitler had never been born? An unquestionable improvement, one would reason and so an earnest history grad student and an aging German physicist idealistically undertake to bring this about by preventing Adolf’s conception. Though humor is still an essential ingredient of both, Fry’s fans are finally getting to witness the emotional depth that this brilliant polymath usually keeps hidden. But his new film in which he plays Oscar Wilde and his new novel this one represent a somewhat alarming departure from his previous work: They’re more serious. Those of us who have already discovered Stephen Fry know him as the brilliant British comedian behind TV series such as Jeeves & Wooster and Blackadder, and the author of two enormously funny novels, The Liar and The Hippopotamus.

The fry chronicles by stephen fry