One of the world's most iconic novels—a timeless story of love in the face of difference and prejudice, known also as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame—in a sparkling new translation commemorating the restoration of Paris's Notre-Dame Cathedral

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

When it was first published in 1831, Notre-Dame de Paris established Victor Hugo, at the age of only twenty-nine, as the premier historical novelist of his time. At the center of it all is the cathedral: Dark, mysterious, bedecked with gargoyles, it looms over the characters—the sinister archdeacon, Claude Frollo; the hunchbacked bellringer, Quasimodo; and the beautiful street dancer, Esmeralda, who enraptures them both—and pulls them in with an almost gravitational force, until it becomes the stage for the novel’s explosive, tragic denouement.

Sweeping, stirring, and written in only four and a half months, in an inspired frenzy of youthful genius, Notre-Dame de Paris brings together the elite and the abject, the sublime and the grotesque of medieval Paris in an epic pageant of operatic passion. This sparkling new translation, the first major one in English in more than thirty years, by a celebrated translator of Hugo’s Les Misérables, is complete and unabridged, and based on the authoritative 1832 text established by the Bibliothèque de la Pléaide. Just as Hugo set out to save the splendors of his city’s Gothic architecture from destruction by writing his great novel, this edition celebrates the reopening of the cathedral after the tragic fire of 2019 and is itself a restoration of one of the greatest historical romances of all time.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.