Les Miserables

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRLWELL

Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Misérables is one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. It is a novel peopled by colourful characters from the nineteenth-century Parisian underworld; the street children, the prostitutes and the criminals. In telling the story of escaped convict Jean Valjean, and his efforts to reform his ways and care for the little orphan girl he rescues from a life of cruelty, Victor Hugo drew attention to the plight of the poor and oppressed. Les Miserables is a masterful detective story, a comic and tragic story of romance and revolution and, ultimately, a tale of redemption and hope.

About the Author

Victor-Marie Hugo was born in 1802 at Besanon, France. By the age of twenty he was married and had published his first poetry collection and a first novel, Hans of Iceland. His literary outpouring between 1826 and 1843 encompassed eight volumes of poetry; four novels, including The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831); ten plays, and a variety of critical writings. Hugo was elected to the Academie Francaise in 1841. The accidental death two years later of his eldest daughter and her husband devastated him and marked the end of his first literary period. Hugo went into exile in Brussels and Jersey, launching fierce literary attacks on the Second Empire in The Story of a Crime, Napoleon the Little, and The Punishments. After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, Hugo returned to France and was reelected to the National Assembly, and then to the Senate. He had become a legendary figure and national icon.