The setting of this extraordinary historical novel is medieval Paris: a city of vividly intermingled beauty and grotesquerie, surging with violent life under the twin towers of its greatest structure and supreme symbol, the cathedral of Notre-Dame. Against this background, Victor Hugo unfolds the haunting drama of Quasimodo, the hunchback; Esmeralda, the gypsy dancer; and Claude Frollo, the priest tortured by the spectre of his own damnation. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony, it is a work that gives full play to the author's brilliant historical imagination and his remarkable powers of description. Whether depicting the frenzy of a brutish mob or the agony of a solitary soul, whether capturing a blaze of sunlight or dungeon darkness, Victor Hugo's art never fails in its quest for the immediacy of felt experience.