Germinal

Set in the 1860s in northern France, Zola's masterpiece of naturalistic fiction portrays the hardships of a mining community in which backbreaking physical exertion is undertaken for starvation wages. Étienne Lantier, an unemployed mechanic with a fiery temper, finds lodgings with the Maheu family and works alongside them in the voracious pit that devours the youth, health, and spirit of its workers. Lantier's idealism and growing enthusiasm for socialism politics contrast with the violence espoused by his Russian anarchist coworker Souvarine. As the miners' conditions become increasingly desperate, Lantier organizes a strike that degenerates into a brutal clash between labor and capital.
Zola witnessed firsthand the poverty and injustice suffered by generations of miners and their families. His vivid, haunting accounts of his characters' suffering are rendered even more powerful by his depictions of their will to live and faith in a better world. Strikingly frank in its depictions of sex and violence, this 1885 novel is a cri de coeur for the working class.

French novelist, playwright, and journalist Emile Zola (1840–1902) was a leading proponent of naturalism in fiction, as expressed in his monumental 20-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart. Nominated for the first and second Nobel Prizes in Literature, Zola also played a major role in the exoneration of the falsely accused officer at the center of the Dreyfus Affair; the headline of his open letter to the President of France, J'accuse...!, remains an international watchword for speaking truth to power.