Les Miserables

"Donougher's translation is a magnificent achievement. It reads easily, sometimes racily, and Hugo's narrative power is never let down...[an] almost flawless translation, which brings the full flavour of one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century to new readers in the twenty-first." --William Doyle, Times Literary Supplement "The year's most interesting publication from Penguin Classics was actually [...] a new translation by Christine Donougher of the novel we all know as Les Mis�rables. You may think that 1,300 pages is a huge investment of time when the story is so familiar, but no adaptation can convey the addictive pleasure afforded by Victor Hugo's narrative voice: by turns chatty, crotchety, buoyant and savagely ironical, it's made to seem so contemporary and fresh in Donougher's rendering that the book has all the resonance of the most topical state-of-the-nation novel." --Telegraph

"Christine Donougher's seamless and very modern translation of Les Mis�rables has an astonishing effect in that it reminds readers that Hugo was going further than any Dickensian lament about social conditions ... [Les Mis] touches the soul." --Herald Scotland