Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)

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.