The story begins in 1815 in Digne, as the peasant Jean Valjean, just released from 19 years' imprisonment in the Bagne of Toulon-five for stealing bread for his

Les Misérables is widely regarded as the greatest epic and dramatic work of fiction ever created or conceived: the epic of a soul transfigured and redeemed, pu

The first new Penguin Classics translation in forty years of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, the subject of The Novel of the Century by David Bellos—published in