num_pages: 1480
description: It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean—a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert—Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama—highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications—of the redemption of one human being.
language: English
title: Les Misérables
titlecomplete: Les Misérables
characters: Combeferre, Mademoiselle Gillenorman, Cosette, Bossuet, Fantine, Fauchelevent, Javert, Toussaint, Gavroche, Marius Pontmercy, Grantaire, Enjolras, Bahorel, Champmathieu, M. & Mme. Thénardier, Éponine, Jean Valjean, Felix Tholomyès, Azelma, Bishop Myriel
genres: Historical Fiction, Historical, French Literature, Novels, Literature, Classic Literature, Classics, Romance, Fiction, France
ratings_count: 780419
places: Paris, Digne, Montreuil, France
awards: awardedAt: 1420099200000
name: French-American Foundation Translation Prize
category: Fiction (Christine Donougher)
publisher: Everyman's Library