Les Misérables

Victor Hugo's vast novel of social justice — following the escaped convict Jean Valjean and the relentless Inspector Javert through the social upheavals of early 19th-century France.

One of the great social novels: Hugo's argument that poverty, not innate wickedness, creates crime — and that social institutions perpetuate injustice. Jean Valjean's moral transformation: from hardened criminal to saint through one act of grace (the bishop's candlesticks). Javert as the embodiment of law divorced from mercy — and his suicide as the system's self-destruction when it encounters genuine goodness. The historical panorama: Waterloo, the sewers of Paris, the 1832 rebellion. One of the most widely adapted works in literature.