Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, published in 1831 and known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, was partly written to draw public attention to the neglected state of Gothic architecture in France — and it succeeded magnificently. Set in fifteenth-century Paris, it follows the fates of the deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo, the beautiful Romani dancer Esmeralda, and the tortured archdeacon Frollo.
Hugo’s portrait of medieval Paris is astonishing in its detail and imagination, and the novel’s emotional power has never dimmed. Download this public-domain English translation as a free EPUB.