One of Zola's Three Cities Trilogy, Lourdes is a story surrounding the famous Catholic healing shrine in Southern France. Lourdes, in addition to telling the tales of many of the sick and dying pilgrims to the famous healing shrine, is also the story of doomed lovers, Pierre a priest who questions his faith, and his frail, sickly lover Marie de Geursaint, who, in finding a cure, perhaps, in the waters of Lourdes, becomes the book's heroine. Although Marie's triumphant cure is described glowingly, Pierre and the reader learn -- it is Marie who cured herself, not the holy waters of Lourdes...

L'Assomir tells the story of Gervaise Macquart. In Paris working as a laundress, she is abandoned with her young sons by her lover, Lantir. She marries a roofing engineer named Coupeau, saves enough money to open her own laundry and bears a daughter named Nana. But a fall from a roof badly injures Coupeau, and he takes to drink during his recovery. Lantier returns, Gervais suffers reverses including losing her shop, and joins Coupeau in a downward spiral of drink. Half of Zola's novels were a set of twenty called Les Rougon-Macquart, set in France's Second Empire.

The Fat and the Thin is the third novel of Zola's twenty volume Rougon-Macquart series. The Fat and the Thin is a study of the teeming life which surrounds the great central markets of Paris. The heroine is Lisa Quenu, a daughter of Antoine Macquart. She has become prosperous, and increasingly selfish. Her brother-in-law Florent has escaped from penal servitude in Cayenne and lives for a short time in her house, but she becomes tired of his presence and ultimately denounces him to the police. As a critic put it: "It also embraces a powerful allegory, the prose song of the eternal battle...

L'Assomir tells the story of Gervaise Macquart. In Paris working as a laundress, she is abandoned with her young sons by her lover, Lantir. She marries a roofing engineer named Coupeau, saves enough money to open her own laundry and bears a daughter named Nana. But a fall from a roof badly injures Coupeau, and he takes to drink during his recovery. Lantier returns, Gervais suffers reverses including losing her shop, and joins Coupeau in a downward spiral of drink. It traces two branches of a single family. Said Zola, "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a...

Emile Zola's His Masterpiece is the author's most autobiographical novel, based in part on his boyhood friendship with the painter Paul Cezanne. The painter of His Masterpiece, Claude Lantier, has much in common with Cezanne, as well as Manet -- the controversial painter of this period whose "realistic" work in some ways mirrors Zola's writing. Claude's friend Pierre Sandoz, the clerk and writer of the novel, is based closely on Zola himself. Not as fortunate in life as was Manet, Claude Lantier's art is misunderstood and he struggles emotionally and financially. From his ill-fated romance...

A gothic tale of murder and adultery, Therese Raquin was denounced as
pornography on its publication in 1867. "Putrid literature" was how
Louis Ulbach described the novel in a contemporary review. Zola
defended himself against these attacks in his preface to the second
edition, in which he outlined his aim to produce a new, "scientific"
form of realism. The novel marks a crucial step in Zola's development
and is a major early work of Naturalism.

In his introduction to
Therese Raquin, Brian Nelson places the novel in its cultural,
intellectual and artistic...