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  • Published: 2 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9781846140495
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 1232
  • RRP: $45.00

Les Miserables




Beautiful clothbound edition of Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love, ahead of the major new film starring Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe.

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful and tactile cloth.

This beautiful clothbound edition of Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love, in a major new translation by Christine Donougher, is published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the novel's first publication, and the major new film starring Hugh Jackman. Les Miserables follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, when, owing to a case of mistaken identity, another man is arrested in his place; and by the relentless investigations of the dogged policeman Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.

  • Published: 2 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9781846140495
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 1232
  • RRP: $45.00

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802-85), novelist, poet, playwright, and French national icon, is best known for two of today’s most popular world classics: Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, as well as other works, including The Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs. Hugo was elected to the Académie Française in 1841. As a statesman, he was named a Peer of France in 1845. He served in France’s National Assemblies in the Second Republic formed after the 1848 revolution, and in 1851 went into self-imposed exile upon the ascendance of Napoleon III, who restored France’s government to authoritarian rule. Hugo returned to France in 1870 after the proclamation of the Third Republic.

Date: 2013-08-06
Victor Hugo (1802-1885), novelist, poet, and dramatist, is one of the most important of French Romantic writers. Among his best-known works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame(1831) and Les Misérables(1862).


INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY:
Jean-Marc Hovasse is Director of Research at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Paris. One of France's leading specialists in 19th-century French literature, he is writing a monumental biography of Victor Hugo of which the first two volumes were published in 2001 and 2008.

Victor Hugo (1802–85) was the most forceful, prolific and versatile of French nineteenth-century writers. He wrote Romantic costume dramas, many volumes of lyrical and satirical verse, political and other journalism, criticism and several novels, the best known of which are Les misérables (1862) and the youthful Notre-Dame de Paris (1831).

A royalist and conservative as a young man, Hugo later became a committed social democrat and during the Second Empire of Napoleon III was exiled from France, living in the Channel Islands. He returned to Paris in 1870 and remained a great public figure until his death: his body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe before being buried in the Panthéon.

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