Emile Zola

Au Bonheur des Dames is the eleventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola. It was first serialized in the periodical Gil Blas and published in novel form by Charpentier in 1883. The novel is set in the world of the department store, an innovative development in mid-nineteenth century retail sales. Zola …

Doctor Pascal is the twentieth and final novel of the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola, first published in June 1893 by Charpentier. Zola's plan for the Rougon-Macquart novels was to show how heredity and environment worked on the members of one family over the course of the Second Empire. He wraps up his heredity …

The thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope. Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to …

La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret is the fifth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Viciously anticlerical in tone, it follows on from the horrific events at the end of La Conquête de Plassans, focussing this time on a remote Provençal backwater village. Unusually for Zola, the novel contains very …