When Baron Thunder-ten-trockh catches his daughter Cunegonde beginning to replicate this experiment in cause-and-effect with Candide, the young lad is unceremoniously kicked out of the castle, tutor included, and so begins one of literature's most famous and bizarre journeys.Candide - young, innocent and guileless - and his tutor, the good and blindly optimistic Dr Pangloss (his specialty is "metaphysico-the-ologo-cosmolo-nigology"), suffer all manner of horrible disasters, includi...

Germinal is one of the most striking novels in the French tradition. 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. Its strong socialist principles and vivid accounts of the miners’ strikes meant that the novel became a key symbol in the workers’ fight against oppression, with chants of ‘Germinal! Germinal!’ resonating high above the author’s funeral.

In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend, Laurent. But their passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a crime that will haunt them forever.Thérèse Raquin caused a scandal when it appeared in 1867 and brought its twenty-seven-year-old auth...