Émile Zola

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....

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....

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....

The Ultimate Classics Collection: Volume Five is the fifth instalment of our wide-ranging classic collections.

Émile Zola's The Fortune of the Rougons (1871), the opening title in the series of twenty novels dealing with the Rougon-Macquart dynasty, explores the origins of the family against the backdrop of the 1851 coup d'état.

Although it is little known in this country, The Belly of Paris is considered one of Émile Zola’s best novels. Set in the newly built food markets of Paris, it is a story of wealth and poverty set against a sumptuous banquet of food and commerce. Having just escaped from prison after being...

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....

Sous le Second Empire, au cœur des Rougon-Macquart, Zola nous entraîne dans l’univers haletant des chemins de fer.

Emile Zola, along with fellow novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, was an early realist in French literature....

The French Classics Collection brings together 18 of the greatest works of fiction ever written in French - here collected into one audiobook and all translated into English.

Brought to you by Penguin. Considered by André Gide to be one of the ten 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. At the centre of the novel is Etienne Lantier, a...

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....

Zola’s Money (L’Argent, 1891) shows the corrupting effect of untrammelled stock-market speculation. While some seek redemption through philanthropic and evangelical ventures, others–such as the main protagonist, Saccard–embrace their own avarice.

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 First published between 1870 and 1893, Émile Zola’s 20-book cycle chronicling four generations of the...

BBC radio adaptations of novels and short stories by Émile Zola, plus a fascinating short documentary and an original drama Novelist, journalist and literature’s greatest whistleblower, Émile Zola was one of the 19th century’s pre-eminent authors. He is renowned for his philosophy of...

À la suite de la mort de son épouse, Jean Macquart, désespéré, personnage principal de "La Terre", reprend du service dans l'armée...

"Lorsque "L'Assommoir" a paru dans un journal, il a été attaqué avec une brutalité sans exemple, dénoncé, chargé de tous les crimes. Est-il...

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....

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.