Émile Zola is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers, whose reputation was reinforced by his historic intervention in the Dreyfus Affair. This book explores Zola’s life and work and the ways in which these were determined by the traumatic history of his times. From humble beginnings, Zola's life was marked by the determination to succeed. Robert Lethbridge traces Zola's development as a writer, including the earliest texts and his novel-cycles, and further shows how Zola’s ...

'in this life, even if you don't ask for much you still end up with bugger all!' In a run-down quarter of Paris, Gervaise Macquart struggles to earn a living and support her family. She earns a pittance washing other people's dirty clothes in the local washhouse, and dreams of having her own laundry. But in order to start her business she must incur debt, and her feckless husband cannot resist the lure of the Assommoir, the local bar that supplies all the working men with...

'My title speaks not merely of war, but also of the crumbling of a regime and the end of a world.' Émile Zola The penultimate novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Débâcle (1892) takes as its subject the dramatic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1. During Zola's lifetime it was the bestselling of all his novels, praised by contemporaries for its epic sweep as well as for its attention to historical detail. La Débâcle seeks to exp...

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a lo...

'Monsieur de Maupassant has never before been so clever.' Henry James Henry James's admiration for 'this masterly little novel' has been echoed throughout the twentieth century by readers of Pierre et Jean. It marked a turning-point in the development of French fiction, situated as it is between traditional social realism and the psychological novel. It is recognized as a classic study of filial jealousy, triggered by one of the two brothers of its title finding himself the sole inheritor ...

'His rise testifies to the decline of a whole society.' Jean-Paul Sartre Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885) is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man (Georges Duroy, christened 'Bel-Ami' by his female admirers) making it to the top in fin-de-siècle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the French colonization of North Africa. It explores the dynamics of an urban society uncomfortably close to our own ...

Considered by André Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Émile Zola's Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty of a mining community in northern FranceÉtienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Compelled to take a back-breakin job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry and in debt, unable to feed ...

'The irresistible power of money, a lever that can lift the world. Love and money are the only things.' Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to make his way once more in Paris. Unscrupulous, seductive, and with unbounded ambition, he schemes and manipulates his way to power. Financial undertakings in the Middle East lead to the establishment of a powerful new bank and speculation on the stock market; Saccard meanwhile conducts his l...

'Respectable people... What bastards!' Unjustly deported to Devil's Island following Louis-Napoleon's coup-d'état in December 1851, Florent Quenu escapes and returns to Paris. He finds the city changed beyond recognition. The old Marché des Innocents has been knocked down as part of Haussmann's grand programme of urban reconstruction to make way for Les Halles, the spectacular new food markets. Disgusted by a bourgeois society whose devotion to food is inseparable...

Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial families, a new and powerful elite.Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family – members of the waning aristocracy – but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko. His devoted friend Honda watches from the sidelines. It is only wh...

A stunningly powerful novel of humanity's will to survive against all odds during an epidemic by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.An International Bestseller • "This is a shattering work by a literary master.”—Boston Globe A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and...

#1 New York Times Bestseller“Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades." — New York TimesA landmark novel by Harper Lee, set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch—“Scout”—returns home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City to ...