'It was the time when the rush for spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.' The Kill (La Curee) is the second volume in Zola's great cycle of

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and ...

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime.

62-year-old Louis Roubieu sees his family's long-awaited prosperity as a reward rained upon him by God for years of arduous toil on the land. Yet it is the very abundance of God's rain, initially observed from the window of their imposing farmhouse, that comes to pose a dire threat to not merely their livelihood, but their very lives.

Therese Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere 'human beasts' who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which ...

The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) recounts the spectacular development of the modern department store in late nineteenth century Paris. The store is a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the bourgeois family; it is emblematic of consumer culture and the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place at the end of the century. Octave Mouret, the store's owner-ma

Florent Quenu returns to Paris after being unjustly imprisoned and finds the city utterly changed. The great new food market, Les Halles, has been built, and food dominates the political and social life of the capital. The third in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, The Belly of Paris appears in a vibrant new translation.

The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist from the provinces who has come to conquer Paris and is conquered by the flaws in his own genius. While his boyhood friend Pierre Sandoz becomes a successful novelist, Claude's originality is mocked at the Salon and turns gradually into a doomed obsession with one great canvas. Life - in the form of his .

Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was la Ville Lumiere, a perfect victim for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy and fin-de-siecle moral corruption. The fate of Nana, the Helen of Troy of the Second Empire, and daughter of the laundress in L'Assommoir, reduced Flaubert to almost inarticulate gasps of admiration: 'Chapter 14, ...

Etienne Lantier, from the illegitimate Macquart branch of the family, arrives in the mining settlement of Montsou, and witnesses at first hand the appalling conditions in which miners live and work. Gradually becoming embroiled in a bitter dispute between the miners and their employers, he eventually leads the strike.

Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his 'most finely worked' novel, and in it he ...

This is a new translation of the seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) - the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. A contemporary bestseller, it outraged conservative critics and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature.

Au Bonheur des Dames is the glittering Paris department store run by Octave Mouret. He has used charm and drive to become director of this mighty emporium, unscrupulously exploiting his young female staff and seducing his lady customers with luxurious displays of shimmering silks, satins, velvets and lace.

Au Bonheur des Dames is the glittering Paris department store run by Octave Mouret. He has used charm and drive to become director of this mighty emporium, unscrupulously exploiting his young female staff and seducing his lady customers with luxurious displays of shimmering silks, satins, velvets and lace. Then Denise Baudu, a nave provincial girl, becomes an assistant at the store, and Mouret dis

Describes working-class people living in the slums of a city.

This new translation of Zola's most acerbic social satire captures the directness and robustness of Zola's language and restores the omissions of earlier abridged versions.

When Jean Macquart arrives in the peasant community of Beauce, where farmers have worked the same land for generations, he finds himself involved in the corrupt affairs of the local Fouan family. But, in a community where land is everything, sibling rivalry quickly turns to brutal hatred, as Buteau declares himself unsatisfied with his lot.

In his three short stories, 'For a Night of Love', 'Nantas', and 'Fasting', Emile Zola presents characters in search of fulfilment - romantic, religious, and financial.