The Man Who Laughs

One of the most famous novels by Victor Hugo, "The Man Who Laughs", along with "Les Misérables" and "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame", is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of 19th-century French literature. It seems to have everything: an atmosphere of mystery, magnificent pages dedicated to English history, a shipwreck, a child abandoned under mysterious circumstances, ruthless robbers, a strange document found in a sealed bottle on the seashore, a blind beauty, a misanthropic benefactor, a tame wolf, and a romantic hero (the influence of his image on the art of later times is hard to overestimate, just think of the Joker with his sinister grin). Gwynplaine's appearance is terrible: "a mouth that opens to the ears", a shapeless nose and a face "that could not be looked at without laughter"; however, his life path, filled with incredible adventures, will not leave any reader indifferent. In this edition, the novel is accompanied by magnificent illustrations by French artists Georges Rouxgross and Daniel Vierge.