Home Les Miserables The Novel (Classics on Cassette) by Victor Hugo; Mark McKerracher (ISBN: 9780453007856)

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Les Miserables The Novel (Classics on Cassette) Audio cassette - 1992

Name: Les Misérables (Classics on Cassette)
Price: 16.86 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Victor Hugo; Reader-Mark McKerracher; Translator-Lee Fahnestock; Translator-Norman MacAfee
ISBN: 9780453007856

by Victor Hugo; Mark McKerracher

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Summary

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.

From the publisher

It is hardly surprising that Victor Hugo's 1862 masterwork should have inspired one of the most phenomenally successful musicals in the history of the Broadway stage. "Les Miserables" has long been recognized as one of the finest novels of all time, a brilliant fusion of unforgettable characters and universal themes.
Its hero is Jean Valjean, the noble peasant imprisoned. A sweeping story of love and honor in the depths of the Parisian underworld, immerses us in an epic struggle between good and evil, and carries us onto the barricades during the uprising of 1832 with a realism that is unsurpassed in modern literature. We experience the desperation of the prostitute, Fantine; the amorality of the rogue, Thenardier; and the unquenchable desire of all human beings to be genuinely free. Hugo saw "Les Miserables" as a means of dramatizing his bitter criticism of French society, but the novel that resulted transcends its own time and place. It's an ever-fascinating story, a sweeping spectacle that dazzles the senses as it touches the heart, and this audio edition captures its lasting greatness.