The Prisoner of Zenda

Résumé

Ideal for intermediate learners of English looking to improve or practise their English. The book is filled with useful vocabulary that is carefully graded and easy to understand, it also comes with audio, so that you can listen to the story at the same time as reading. 'We must leave for Zenda at once, to find the King!' cried Sapt. 'If we're caught, we'll all be killed!'So Rudolf Rassendyll and Sapt gallop through the night to find the King of Ruritania. But the King is now a prisoner in the Castle of Zenda. Who will rescue him from his enemies, the dangerous Duke Michael and Rupert of Hentzau?And who will win the heart of the beautiful Princess Flavia?

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The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), by Anthony Hope, is an adventure novel in which the King of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus is unable to attend the ceremony. Political forces within the realm are such that, in order for the king to retain the crown, his coronation must proceed. Fortuitously, an English gentleman on holiday in Ruritania who resembles the monarch is persuaded to act as his political decoy in an effort to save the unstable political situation of the interregnum.

The name of the villain in The Prisoner of Zenda, Rupert of Hentzau, is the title of the sequel novel, Rupert of Hentzau (1898), published four years later, and is included in some editions of The Prisoner of Zenda. The popularity of the novels inspired the Ruritanian romance genre of literature, film, and theatre that features stories set in a fictional country, usually in Central Europe and Eastern Europe, such as Ruritania, the Central European realm that named the genre, which includes the Graustark novels by George Barr McCutcheon.