Les Miserables Mass market paperbound - 1987

Considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, Les Miserables (translated variously from French as The Miserable Ones, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, The Victims) is a French historical novel by Victor Hugo. The story follows the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean from 1815 through the 1832 Rebellion in Paris. Les Miserables' beloved story of redemption encourages compassion and hope in the face of adversity and injustice.   

The epic novel is divided in five volumes, each of which is divided into several books and subdivided into chapters, totaling 48 books and 365 chapters. Les Miserables, as a whole, is one the longest novels ever written with about 1,500 pages in unabridged English editions and 1,900 pages in French. Les Misérables is known to many through its numerous stage and screen adaptations, such as the stage musical of the same name, sometimes abbreviated "Les Mis".

Les Miserables is the great epic masterpiece of the mid-nineteenth century. Begun in 1845, the year Louis Philippe conferred a peerage and a lifetime seat in the Senate upon Victor Hugo, it was completed when the author was living in exile in the Channel Islands. Les Miserables is a product as well as a document of the political, social, and religious upheaval that followed the Napoleonic Wars and Europe's great democratic revolutions. The story is centered on Jean Valjean, a peasant who enters the novel a hardened criminal after nineteen years spent in prison for stealing a loaf of bread for the starving children of his sister. The path of Valjean's last twenty-five years, leading from the French provinces to the battlefield of Waterloo and the ramparts of Paris during the Uprising of 1832, introduces us to secret societies of revolutionaries and the vast world of the French lower classes. Jean Valjean's flight from the police agent Javert--the prototype of over a hundred years of fictional detectives--culminates in one of the most famous scenes in all literature, the chase through the sewers of Paris. Les Miserables sold out its large first printing in twenty-four hours and has remained enormously popular. This edition is the classic English translation of Hugo's friend Charles Wilbour, which appeared the same year the novel was published in France.

Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Co. first published Les Miserables in Brussels in 1862. The Paris edition was published a few days later.