The Man Who Laughs

Disfigured in childhood into a permanent grin, the traveling entertainer Gwynplaine—’the man who laughs’—discovers he is heir to an English peerage, only to find the corrupt aristocracy more monstrous than his own scarred face. Hugo’s sweeping, grotesque romance is a savage indictment of social injustice, wrapped in a melodrama of lost identity, doomed love, and the cruelty of power. Rich in Gothic imagery and passionate rhetoric, The Man Who Laughs contrasts the goodness of the outcast with the depravity of the privileged. Dark, strange, and powerful, it is a haunting fable of a disfigured soul whose eternal smile masks a breaking heart, from the author of Les Misérables.