Author: mile Zola

Considered by Andr Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, mile Zola’s Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty of a mining community in northern France tienne Lantier, …

Now the basis for the major BBC tv adaptation The Paradise, this is a lavish drama and a timeless commentary on consumerism. The Penguin Classics edition of mile Zola’s The Ladies’ Delight is based o …

La Bete humaine (1890), the seventeenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is one of Zola’s most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion, and possession, it is also a com …

Set in the taverns of Paris, this is perhaps the first classical tragedy of working-class people living in the slums of a city. The Drinking Den (1877) is part of the Rougon-Macquart series, a natura …

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher’s shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this powerful novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, b …

When Jean Macquart arrives in the peasant community of Beauce, where farmers have worked the same land for generations, he quickly finds himself involved in the corrupt affairs of the local Fouan fam …

Conservative and working-class, Jean Macquart is an experienced, middle-aged soldier in the French army, who has endured deep personal loss. When he first meets the wealthy and mercurial Maurice Leva …

Born to drunken parents in the slums of Paris, Nana lives in squalor until she is discovered at the Th tre des Vari t s. She soon rises from the streets to set the city alight as the most famous high …