Les Misérables

Victor Hugo’s vast and humane masterpiece of justice, mercy, revolution, and the moral lives that unfold under historical pressure.

At a glance Les Misérables is one of the great panoramic novels of the nineteenth century: a work of… At its center stands Jean Valjean, whose life becomes the thread linking a whole moral… Victor Hugo writes with epic amplitude but never loses sight of individual lives. The novel opens outward into meditations on institutions, crime, childhood, faith, and…

Why the novel endures

About this book A sweeping novel of redemption, law, poverty, love, rebellion, and conscience, following Jean Valjean and a vast cast through nineteenth-century France.