Emile 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....

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....

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

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....

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....

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...

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....

Des batignolles à Auteuil, un mécanicien de locomotive erre, le couteau à la main, hanté par une idée fixe : tuer une femme...

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....

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

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...

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....

Octave Mouret (le futur héros du "Bonheur des dames"), débarque à Paris et devient le nouveau locataire d'un immeuble bourgeois de six étages...

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....

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....

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.

The irresistible power of money, a lever that can lift the world. Love and money are the only things....

Thérèse is a half Algerian orphan, brought up in provincial France by her aunt and married off to her sickly cousin Camille. His ambition takes the three of them to Paris, where they set up home in the dank and dingy backstreets that run down to the Seine....

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