The Toilers of the Sea

Victor Hugo

“No character was ever thrown into such strange relief as Gilliatt… here, indeed, the true position of man in the universe.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

The Toilers of the Sea tells the fairytale-esque story of Gilliatt, an outcast fisherman who must rescue an engine from a wrecked steamship. If successful, he will win the hand of the shipowner's beautiful daughter, Déruchette. He will brave the harsh rocks, the freezing waves, and even the grasp of a sea monster to prove his worth.

A richly detailed study of early nineteenth-century Guernsey, The Toilers of the Sea is the oft-forgotten novel that completes a trilogy with Hugo’s famed The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. It is a tribute to the drama of nature and the insignificance of man against it, to solitude in exile, and the light we choose to carry in the darkness.

In conversation with

Andrew Chater is a broadcaster, storyteller and cultural explorer. The winner of six BAFTA awards for his history programming in the UK, he now lectures in History and Literature at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he leads students on a series of classes exploring regional cultures through the medium of classic and contemporary fiction, a format he calls “bookpacking” (www.bookpackers.com).

Maya Weeks is a geographer, writer, and artist from rural California working on feminist environmental justice. A first-generation college student, she holds her B.A. in Language Studies (Spanish) from the University of California in Santa Cruz and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Mills College. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California in Davis, where she wrote her dissertation on marine pollution, gender, and feminist political economy using qualitative and creative methods. Recent poetry has been published in Space on Space and recent nonfiction has been published in Zócalo Public Square. A record, Tethers, is out on Full Spectrum Records. She has exhibited at Vague Research Studios and performed at Historical Materialism. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, How to Be on the Outside of Every Inside/How to Be Inside Every Outside (these signals press, 2016). Residencies include Konstepidemin, The Arctic Circle, Mustarinda, Norton Island, and more. Maya lives and works on unceded Chumash land.