In the Library
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo, 1862
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 41 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood
- Original
- Original fr
- Chapters
- Chapters 363
- Length
- Length 560k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky matches Hugo's scope and moral ambition, with the same conviction that redemption is possible.
£1.99
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Dickens builds another story around a convict's hidden generosity, but keeps it to a single life instead of a nation.
£1.99
About the book
Nineteen years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread, and days out of prison the convict steals again, the silver from the one house that fed him. When the police drag him back, the bishop tells them the silver was a gift, and presses on him the two candlesticks he 'forgot.' Everything in Victor Hugo's vast novel pours out of that single act of mercy: Fantine selling her hair and then her teeth for a daughter she cannot reach, Éponine taking a bullet in the rain for a boy who loves someone else, a barricade rising in a Paris that will not be saved. Hugo halts the story for the whole of Waterloo and the depths of the Paris sewers because he is making one furious case, that no soul is forever what its worst hour made it. Inspector Javert, who has built his life on the opposite belief, cannot survive being proven wrong, and walks into the Seine. Read it for the candlesticks, and for everything a man spends a life trying to be worth.