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  • Published: 1 January 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099529965
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 1376
  • RRP: $24.99

Les Miserables




NOW A MAJOR BBC TV ADAPTATION

'Still grips the reader with its epic-narrative sweep and all-embracing humanitarianism' Douglas Kennedy, Sunday Times

Read the masterful story of romance and revolution behind the hit BBC TV series.
Les Misérables 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.

Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Misérables is one of the greatest stories ever told.

NOW A MAJOR BBC TV ADAPTATION STARRING DOMINIC WEST, OLIVIA COLEMAN AND DAVID OYELOWO

'There are plenty of translations of this extensive, exuberant novel that cut out anything superfluous. But God is in the detail…This is the one to read’ Jeanette Winterson

  • Published: 1 January 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099529965
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 1376
  • RRP: $24.99

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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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Praise for Les Miserables

I sobbed and wailed and thought (books) were the greatest things

Susan Sontag

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo changed my life. The first time I read the book was when I was less than eight years old. I could only understand the part about little Cosette, but that chapter really got me

Xinran, Financial Times

Every single character is so well delineated, we all know these people and all human life is here

Cameron Mackintosh, creator of the musical, Les Miserables

One of the finest French Romantic writers

Guardian

This new translation...marvelously removes the yellowed varnish from Hugo's prose and gives us the racy, breathless, and passionate intelligence of the original

Adam Gopnik

There are plenty of translations of this extensive, exuberant novel that cut out anything superfluous. But God is in the detail, and Julie Rose has returned all the detail, making a language that is rich and gorgeous. This is the one to read... and if you are flying, just carry it under your arm as you board, or better still, rebook your holiday and go by train, slowly, page by page...

Jeanette Winterson, The Times