KS5/Adult LRC Book Recommendation - Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Adapted by the BBC in a lavish new television series for Christmas 2018, Les Misérables is a timeless story; a plot-driven epic of one man’s search for redemption and of lives swept up, made and broken in the tumultuous social and political changes of early nineteenth-century France.

It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.

An epic portrait of crime, punishment, exile, justice, redemption, love, despair and high idealism, Les Misérables is justifiably regarded as one of the greatest novels of all time. At its heart are the reverberations rippling from the life of one man: Jean Valjean.

Imprisoned in the Bagne of Toulon for 19 years for the original crime of stealing a loaf of bread, Valjean emerges embittered; fuelled by rage at a broken system of justice. When the course of his life is changed by a single, unexpected act of faith and generosity he begins a life of escape and reparation. Yet as he attempts to forge a place in society Valjean is forever dogged by the pursuit of tenacious policeman Javert, who sees in the law only an immoveable and undeniable force to be obeyed at all costs.

Into their orbit are drawn a host of vivid and unforgettable characters; from the tragic victim Fantine and her daughter Cosette to the grasping and ruthless Thénardiers and Marius, a man driven by his father’s Napoleonic past into a battle of his own.

Like Dickens’s Great Expectations - published a year before Hugo’s masterpiece - Les Misérables delves deeply into the unseen connections between criminality and social inequality. Begun in Paris and completed when Hugo was himself living a 19-year-long exile in Guernsey, Les Misérables Moving from the Battle of Waterloo to the barricades of the June rebellion of 1832 and framed against the teeming streets of Paris’s suburbs, Hugo conjures an unforgettable portrait of a nation and a story whose themes continues to echo powerfully today.