In the Library
Ninety-Three
Victor Hugo, 1874
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 9 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Aline Delano
- Chapters
- Chapters 77
- Length
- Length 123k 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.
Pity may rise to the level of a crime.
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
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Dickens is standing at the same scaffold with the same question, whether one private act of decency can be worth more than everything a cause demands.
£1.99
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
The same conviction at four times the length, that a man is never finally what the law has decided he is, argued through a whole century of Paris.
£1.99
About the book
A cannon breaks loose in the hold of a corvette in a gale, and Hugo gives it a whole chapter: what a runaway gun does to a ship, and to the men who have to go down and catch it. By the end you understand that he has been describing 1793. Three men hold the book together. An old Breton marquis fighting for the king, his own great-nephew commanding the republican column that hunts him, and the former priest sent from Paris to see that the young man's mercy does not get in the way. Walking through the middle of the war is a peasant woman looking for her three children. Everything turns on one act, when a man who has earned every death the Revolution can give him goes back into a burning tower for three children who are nothing to him. Hugo wrote this last, at seventy-two. It loves the Revolution, and it will not let the Revolution off.