A compelling and compassionate view of the victims of early nineteenth-century French society, Les Misérables is a novel on an epic scale, moving inexorably from the eve of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo to the July Revolution of 1830.

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 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 malevolent police detective Javert — Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

Set in the Parisian underworld and plotted like a detective story, Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, and an epic portrayal of nineteenth-century Parisian society.