‘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. Victor Hugo’s sweeping tale of injustice, heroism, and love centres on Jean Valjean, an escaped convict striving to leave his criminal past behind — only to find that path endlessly complicated by his own conscience and the relentless pursuit of the dogged Inspector Javert. His struggle for freedom is not his alone: he has sworn to protect the infant daughter of Fantine, a woman driven to prostitution by grinding poverty. Christine Donougher’s translation — introduced by Robert Tombs and recommended by David Bellos in The Novel of the Century as the finest available in English — brings all of Hugo’s extraordinary narrative energy into vivid contemporary life. ‘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’ — William Doyle, Times Literary Supplement. ‘You may think that 1,300 pages is a huge investment of time when the story is so familiar, but no adaptation can convey the addictive pleasure afforded by Victor Hugo’s narrative voice: by turns chatty, crotchety, buoyant and savagely ironical, it’s made to seem so contemporary and fresh in Donougher’s rendering that the book has all the resonance of the most topical state-of-the-nation novel’ — Telegraph.
ISBN 13: 9780241248744
Author: Victor Hugo
