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Paris, 1482. On the day of the Feast of Fools, the crowd crowns the ugliest face in the city: Quasimodo, the deaf, half-blind bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, abandoned as an infant and raised inside the cathedral by the archdeacon Claude Frollo. In the square below dances La Esmeralda, a young street performer whose beauty sets in motion the obsession that will destroy nearly everyone in the book — Frollo's, consuming and murderous; Quasimodo's, wordless and self-effacing; and that of a handsome captain who means none of it.

When Esmeralda is condemned on a charge she did not commit, Quasimodo carries her into the cathedral and claims sanctuary, and Hugo turns the building itself into the novel's central character: its towers, its galleries, its bells, and the mob that finally comes for it. The cathedral is not a backdrop here but a witness, and its stones carry more of the story than any of the people in it.

Hugo wrote the book in 1831 as an act of preservation. Medieval Paris was being demolished around him and Notre-Dame was half-ruined and unloved; he set out to make France look at it again, and the novel's success led directly to the cathedral's restoration. Few works of fiction have so plainly saved the thing they were written about. This is an unabridged recording of a fresh modern translation.