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 4th in the series first published in the original French in 1874, is in many ways a sequel to the first novel in the cycle, The Fortune of the Rougons (1871), and is again centred on the fictional Provencal town of Plassans. The plot revolves around a sinister cleric's attempt at political intrique with disastrous consequences for some of the townsfolk. Reprinted from a 1917 edition of Ernest A Vizetelly's authorised English translation which first appeared in 1901.
