Christmas 2013: the best classics and reissues The year's most interesting publication from Penguin Classics was actually The Wretched (RRP £18.99, Telegraph price £16.99): not the second volume of poor, downtrodden Morrissey's memoirs, but a new translation by Christine Donougher of the novel we all know as Les Misérables. You may think that 1,300 pages is a huge investment of time when the story is so familiar, but no adaptation can convey the addictive pleasure afforded by Victor Hugo's narrative voice: by turns chatty, crotchety, buoyant and savagely ironical, it's made to seem so contemporary and fresh in Donougher's rendering that the book has all the resonance of the most topical state-of-the-nation novel. Angel (Virago Modern Classics, RRP £12.99, Telegraph price £11.99) is the pick of the new reissues of the novels of Elizabeth Taylor, with handsome jackets designed by Celia Birtwell. As Hilary Mantel puts it in her introduction, in this 1957 novel "an accomplished, deft and somewhat underrated writer has a great deal of fun at the expense of a crass, graceless and wildly overpaid one"; nevertheless, this tale of a schlocky novelist boasts more insight into the writerly life than you'll find in most biographies of writers. An exception is Muriel Spark's brief but brilliant biography of Mary Shelley (Carcanet, RRP £12.95, Telegraph price £11.95), which has all the economy and ruthless insight of her novels. She is a doughty champion of Mary but when it comes to the figures she disapproves of - Byron, or Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont - Spark's stiletto-sharp sentences seem to serve as both judgment and execution. Selina Hastings" Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (Capuchin Classics, RRP £12.99, Telegraph price £11.99) is a more conventional literary life, but still bursts with energy and wit. It provides both instructive criticism of a great artist - the master of the "literature of disillusionment," in Rebecca West's view - and the baser pleasure of reading about one of the most inventively rude men who ever lived. Finally, disproving Dr Johnson's view that odd books never last, Raymond Queneau's much-loved jeu d'esprit Exercises in Style (Alma Classics, paperback £7.99) is back in print 66 years after its first publication. It consists of 99 brief chapters, each retelling the same anecdote in a different style - it might be in cockney dialect or pig Latin, or in the form of a sonnet or haiku. The cumulative effect, in Barbara Wright's ingenious translation from the French, is both educative and hilarious, and it will fit in a stocking more easily than Les Mis.