Les Misérables

That lifetime belongs to Jean Valjean, and around him Victor Hugo gathers a whole century of France. There is Fantine, a mother selling her hair, her teeth, and finally herself to pay for a child she has left in the care of the scheming innkeeper Thénardier. There is Cosette, that child, scrubbing floors by candlelight until a stranger in a shabby yellow coat sets an enormous doll before her and she stares at it as though at the sun. And there is Javert, the police inspector whose faith in law and order is total, who will spend decades certain that a man cannot truly change.

Hugo writes on a grand scale, barricades and sewers and courtrooms, a Paris trembling on the edge of revolt — yet the book keeps returning to small, human things: a coin slipped into an empty wooden shoe, a name spoken for the first time in a garden. The register is impassioned, elevated, tender toward the poor and the hunted, and unafraid of a philosophy delivered in a single line.

A book of great length that earns every page by never letting go of one question: whether a soul can be remade, and what one gesture of kindness can set in motion. Cosette's doll is still glittering in the toyshop window.