Ben-Hur

Judah Ben-Hur is a young prince of Jerusalem when his boyhood friend Messala returns from Rome remade—proud, ambitious, and contemptuous of his own people. When an accident gives Messala the chance to destroy the house of Hur, he takes it: Judah is condemned without trial to the galleys, his mother and sister walled away, his fortune seized. So begins one of the great revenge stories in popular fiction.

Left for dead at the oar, Judah survives, wins his freedom and a Roman fortune, and trains every nerve toward a single end—to find his lost family and to be avenged on the friend who betrayed him. The collision the whole book drives toward is the chariot race in the great circus at Antioch, the most famous set-piece in American popular literature, where Judah and Messala meet at last in a thunder of hooves, dust, and shattering wheels.

But the race is not the end. Running alongside Judah's story, from the journey of the wise men to the foot of the cross, is the life of Christ, who appears at the great turning points of the hero's fate. Wallace—a Union general who wrote the book by lantern light while governing the New Mexico Territory—sets the way of the sword against the way of forgiveness, and asks whether any vengeance, once achieved, can fill the place where a ruined life used to be.

Lavish in its reconstruction of the ancient world, sweeping in its spectacle, and finally a story of faith, Ben-Hur became the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century and the basis of the famous 1925 and 1959 films. More than a century later it remains a stirring, large-hearted epic of injury, endurance, and the long road from revenge to grace.