Émile Zola

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.

Le second Empire est à son apogée. Paris est, pour les favorisés, une éternelle fête.

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....

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. They invited him into their home. He took everything. François and Marthe Mouret have carved out a life of comfortable respectability in the provincial town of Plassans. Their household is peaceful, their marriage solid, their children thriving. When...

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....

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....

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Paradise is not lost. It is forbidden. Serge Mouret is the perfect priest—pious, devoted, consumed by a mystical love for God that leaves no room for earthly desire. In the blighted village of Artaud, he ministers to his impoverished flock while...

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

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....

Against a backdrop of modernisation, extravagant luxury, political intrigue and sexual immorality, Saccard treats close relationships as money-making opportunities and loved ones as mere commodities. As one character puts it: ‘You see, everything is fine, as long as you make money from it.’

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...

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...

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....

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....

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...

"Le sujet de Nana est celui-ci : Toute une société se ruant sur le cul. Une meute derrière une chienne, qui n'est pas en chaleur et qui...

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.

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.

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.