Read The Second Sex

A concierge who hides her intelligence and a girl planning suicide in a Paris building.

Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, until it is not; cultivate your garden.

Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.

Two aristocrats play seduction as a game by letter, in the last decade before the guillotine.

London and Paris during the Terror; "it is a far, far better thing that I do".

D Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis against the Cardinal; all for one.

Jean Valjean, a loaf of bread and nineteen years; Hugo's Paris from the sewers to the barricades.

Quasimodo, Esmeralda and the cathedral Hugo wrote the book to save.