Victor Hugo (Author) Victor Hugo was born in Besancon, France in 1802. In 1822 he published his first collection of poetry and in the same year, he married his childhood friend, Adele Foucher. In 1831 he published his most famous youthful novel, Notre-Dame de Paris. A royalist and conservative as a young man, Hugo later became a committed social democrat and was exiled from France as a result of his political activities. In 1862, he wrote his longest and greatest novel, Les Miserables. After his death in 1885, his body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe before being buried in the Pantheon. Robert Tombs (Introducer) Robert Tombs is Professor of History at Cambridge University. His most recent book is The English and Their History (2014). Christine Donougher (Translator) Christine Donougher is a freelance translator and editor. She has translated numerous books from French and Italian, and won the 1992 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for her translation of Sylvie Germain's The Book of Nights.
A magnificent achievement. It reads easily, sometimes racily, and Hugo's narrative power is never let down ... An almost flawless translation, which brings the full flavour of one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century to new readers in the twenty-first * The Times Literary Supplement * Christine Donougher's seamless and very modern translation of Les Miserables has an astonishing effect in that it reminds readers that Hugo was going further than any Dickensian lament about social conditions ... The Wretched touches the soul * Herald Scotland *