Sarah Lea

The novelist, poet and politician, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a towering figure in French 19th-century public life. The author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame became a symbol of the French Republic’s ideals of equality and freedom during his long exile in the Channel Islands. His ink-and-wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes may be less well known than his writings, but they inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets, and many artists, including the Surrealists; Vincent van Gogh compared them to ‘astonishing things’. This handsome book – the catalogue of an exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with Paris Musées – Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France – includes new texts by leading authorities on Hugo and reproductions of many of his finest works on paper, from early caricatures and travel drawings to dramatic landscapes and experiments in abstraction.

Her home and family desecrated by a fire, Justice Peters is whisked away to the House of Lancaster, run by a woman named Sarah and her lover, Samson, who forces the residents to live a life of Old Testament law. Her only possession from her past is an old photograph of the father who had abandoned her before she was born. As the agonizing days turn into months, Justice's memories begin to fade. It is only the visits from an unearthly stranger who makes each day at the House of Lancaster easier to bear, but still burning within her is her desire to one day escape from this vicious cult, seek out her father and destroy him. It is not until she finds her father when she realizes that sometimes one has to live a lie in order to recognize the truth.