Episode 4

Still exiled on Guernsey, as the author Victor Hugo tries to reconstruct Paris from memory, distance also complicates the revision and delivery of his final manuscript to Brussels.

There has never been a book like it. War and Peace, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment were all published in the same decade, yet only Les Misérables can stand as the novel of the nineteenth century. How did Victor Hugo's epic work come to be the most widely read and frequently adapted story of all time? And why is its message just as important for our century as it was for his own?

Author David Bellos tells the compelling story of The Novel of the Century.

Reader: Daniel Weyman
Abridged by Eileen Horne
Produced by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4.