Publisher's Synopsis
Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, playwright and journalist, and the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism. He was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902. More than half of Zola's novels were part of a set of 20 known collectively as Les Rougon-Macquart, examining two branches of a family - the respectable Rougons and the disreputable Macquarts - over five generations. This novel, the 15th in the series first published in the original French in 1887, is set in a rural community in the Beauce, an area in central France west of Paris. It offers a vivid description of the hardships and brutality of rural life in the late 19th century as the story of the disintegration of a family of agricultural workers in Second Empire France unfolds. Reprinted from an English translation of 1888.
