The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

An emotionally stirring story, Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is rightfully considered to be one of the finest novels ever written.

Rejected by fifteenth-century Parisian society, the hideously deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo believes he is safe under the watchful eye of his master, the Archdeacon Claude Frollo. But after Quasimodo saves the beautiful Romani girl Esmeralda from the gallows and brings her to sanctuary in the cathedral, his and Frollo’s mutual desire for her put them increasingly at odds, before compassion and cruelty clash with tragic results.

Dracula, Frankenstein and The Shadow in The Corner and Other Classic Ghost Stories are also available in this series of gorgeous pocket-sized paperbacks from Macmillan Collector’s Library which celebrates the very best Gothic and horror literature, teeming with monsters, misfits and ghosts.

Victor-Marie Hugo was born in Besançon, France, in 1802. A precocious writer, in 1827 he published his epic verse drama Cromwell, a political allegory whose preface might be regarded as a Romanticist manifesto. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame followed in 1831 and throughout the following decade he wrote a number of plays, stories and poetry collections. However, his literary output in the few years after 1843, when his daughter died in a drowning accident, was sparse. He began a new novel as an outlet for his grief, but would only complete it many years later as Les Misérables (1862). He died in 1885.