About this audiobook
Marked by imprisonment for stealing bread, Jean Valjean finds that release does not easily restore a place in society. An encounter with a compassionate bishop offers him another understanding of what a person can become. His effort to build a different life brings new responsibilities, including his care for the young Cosette, while Inspector Javert continues to treat his past as the key to his identity.
Victor Hugo places these lives within a wider world of poverty, ambition and political unrest. The law and the need for mercy repeatedly come into conflict, and apparently private decisions reveal the pressures imposed by social institutions. Valjean's actions matter to people whose hopes are vulnerable to circumstances beyond their control.
The novel examines compassion, responsibility and the possibility of change. It asks whether justice can be complete without attention to suffering, and how one person's decision to help another can alter the course of several lives.
