Toilers of the Sea

Gilliatt is a solitary fisherman on the island of Guernsey whom his neighbours suspect of witchcraft. When the steamship Durande is wrecked on the Douvres rocks, its owner promises his niece Déruchette to whoever can bring the engine back. Gilliatt goes out alone and spends weeks on the reef, fighting storms, hunger and, in the most famous scene, a giant octopus.

Hugo wrote the novel in 1866 during his exile on Guernsey and dedicated it to the island. It is a story of human will against the sea, and its ending is one of the most quietly heartbreaking he wrote. Readers who loved the scale of Les Misérables will find here a smaller, wilder book.

Victor Hugo (1802–1885), leading voice of French Romanticism, wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and spent nearly twenty years in exile in the Channel Islands for opposing Napoleon III.

There he finished Les Misérables, the story of the convict Jean Valjean, and Toilers of the Sea; the poet Hafez Ibrahim's Arabic version of Les Misérables made it a favourite of Arab readers.