Émile Zola

Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking 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 and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all....

Unjustly deported to Devil's Island following Louis-Napoleon's coup-d'etat in December 1851, Florent Quenu escapes and returns to Paris. He finds the city changed beyond recognition. The old Marche 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 from its devotion to...

Set in the lower echelons of 1860s Paris, Therese Raquin, a sexually repressed, beautiful young woman, is trapped into a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin Camille by her domineering aunt, Madame Raquin. After she meets her husband's alluring friend Laurent, she embarks on an illicit affair that leads to tragic consequences.