Emile Zola

Octave Mouret, précurseur inspiré, bouleverse sa corporation comme Haussmann bouleverse la ville. Il parie tout sur les femmes, sur leurs envies et sur leur incapacité à surmonter les tentations.
Une lui résiste : Denise, incarnation de la vertu et de la générosité. Elle devient une obsession pour cet ogre.

Although it is little known in this country, The Belly of Paris is considered one of Émile Zola’s best novels....

"Je veux vous expliquer comment une famille, un petit groupe d'êtres, se comporte dans une société, en s'épanouissant pour...

Glenda Jackson stars in this award-winning BBC Radio series, inspired by literature's greatest ever whistleblower, Émile Zola, and his epic saga of the Rougon-Macquart family....

The lives of two railwaymen on the Paris-to-Le-Havre line are fatally entwined by their love for the same woman, in this shocking account of brutal violence, greed, revenge, and repression....

Country girl Denise Baudu arrives in Paris hoping for a position in her uncle's clothing shop. However, her uncle's shop, along with other small shops in the area, is doing poorly....

Orphaned with a substantial inheritance at the age of 10, Pauline Quenu is taken from Paris to live with her relatives, Monsieur and Madame Chanteau and their son Lazare, in the village of Bonneville on the wild Normandy coast. Her presence enlivens the household....

Étienne Lantier, mécanicien au chômage, erre sur les routes du nord de la France. Au hasard d'une rencontre, frigorifié et mort de faim, il finit par...

Le second empire vu sous l'angle des Rougon, archétypes de la bourgeoisie ambitieuse et parvenue.

Perhaps the most autobiographical of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels, The Masterpiece is a hard, bleak, and raw portrait of unrecognized artistic genius....

Brutal, gripping, and heart-wrenching, L'Assommoir (also known as The Drinking Den) chronicles the tragic downward spiral of Gervaise Macquart, a good-natured and hardworking laundress who slides into alcoholism and despair....

Nana Coupeau is a beautiful woman, able to attract men of enormous wealth with the crook of her finger. Part-time prostitute, part-time actress, she makes her debut in a mediocre operetta at the bustling Paris World’s Fair of 1867....

Considered by André Gide to be one of the 10 greatest novels in the French language, Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty and wretchedness of a mining community in Northern France under the second empire....

Once upon a time, a teenaged Kate Winslet (The Reader, Titanic, Revolutionary Road) received a gift that would leave a lasting impression: a copy of Emile Zola’s classic Thérèse Raquin....

Widely regarded as Zola's masterpiece, the novel describes the working conditions of French coalminers in the 1860s in harsh and realistic terms. It is visceral, graphic, and unrelenting....

Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883) plays out in a colossal and opulent Parisian department store of the same name. Its owner, Octave Mouret, builds his innovative, upmarket women’s fashion empire....

Dans ce roman, on découvre une société dominée par le plaisir et l'argent, le milieu du théâtre parisien au 19ème siècle et de la prostitution...

Zola’s La Terre (The Earth) proved highly controversial on publication in 1887 and still retains the power to shock. It follows the fortunes of the Fouan family in the years leading up to the Franco-Prussian War....

Sous le second empire, le bouleversement de Paris voit le quartier marchand se transformer avec l'apparition du projet Baltard...

Sex, betrayal, murder and corruption form the basis of this sensational novel by one of the leading French authors of the 19th century....