Les Rougon-Macquart Series

Book 1

Serge Mouret, the younger son of Francois Mouret, was ordained to the priesthood and appointed Cure of Les Artaud, a squalid village in Provence, to whose degenerate inhabitants he ministered with small encouragement. He had inherited the family taint of the Rougon-Macquarts, which in him took the same form as in the case of his mother-a morbid religious enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. Brain fever followed, and bodily recovery left the priest without a mental past. Dr. Pascal Rougon, his uncle, hoping to save his reason, removed him from his accustomed surroundings and left him at the Paradou, the neglected demesne of a ruined mansion-house near Les Artaud, where he was nursed by Albine, niece of the caretaker.

Book 5

La Faute de L'Abbe Mouret

by Emile Zola

Published 1 April 2010

Book 5

La Faute de l'Abb

by Emile Zola

Published 5 November 2018

Book 6

Son Excellence Eugene Rougon

by Emile Zola

Published 1 January 1924

Book 7

L'Assommoir

by Emile Zola

Published 1 July 1951

Lantier and Gervaise are fresh from the south, making a new life in Paris. But Lantier soon succumbs to urban degeneracy and abandons her. Gervaise, marries Coupeau the roofer and strives to realise her dream of running her own laundry. Hardship, however, is never far away. The text is here accompanied by an introduction, notes, selected criticism, text summary and a chronology of Zola's life and times.

Book 8

Une page D'amour

by Emile Zola

Published 20 March 1969

Book 8

Une Page D

by Emile Zola

Published 8 November 2018

Book 9

Nana

by Emile Zola

Published December 1957

Nana tells the story of the rise of Nana Coupeau from a street prostitute to a high class cocotte (courtesan) during the final years of the Second French Empire. Through her performance in La blonde Venus, a fictional operetta, she attracts the attention of society and proceeds to destroy every man that she encounters. Nana is the ninth volume of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series and was published in 1880. The novel depicts the moral corruption that Zola believed was the cause of the downfall of the Second Empire.

Book 10

Pot-Bouille

by Emile Zola

Published 14 March 1972

Regarded as one of the best novels of the 19th century, Pot-Bouille strips away the facades of middle-class life and hypocrisy in a manner which outraged contemporary France, inciting scandal and court cases. This study edition contains both the text and a commentary upon it.

Book 11

Au Bonheur des dames

by Emile Zola

Published 1 January 1967

Book 12

La Joie de Vivre

by Emile Zola

Published 1 January 1967

Book 13

Germinal

by Emile Zola

Published 1 December 1956

The novel's central character is ...tienne Lantier, previously seen in L'Assommoir (1877), a young migrant worker who arrives at the forbidding coalmining town of Montsou in the bleak far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior - he befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit. ...tienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a naïve youth; Zola's genetic theories come into play as ...tienne is presumed to have inherited his Macquart ancestors' traits of hotheaded impulsiveness and an addictive personality capable of exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions.

Book 14

L'Oeuvre

by Emile Zola

Published 20 February 1968