The Beast-Man. Germinal

Emile Zola is one of the pillars of world realistic literature, the founder and theorist of naturalism, an enthusiastic researcher of everyday life, a passionate human rights advocate and journalist, who influenced all the realistic direction of literature in the 20th century. His most famous work is the monumental twenty-volume cycle "The Rougon-Macquart", revealing an endless panorama of human vices and virtues against the backdrop of the Second Empire. It is a genuine encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces through the example of several generations of one family, which produced the most bizarre fruits.
This illustrated edition includes the novels that occupy, according to the order prescribed by the author, the fifteenth and sixteenth places in the cycle.
The hero of the novel "The Beast-Man" Jacques Lantier, the son of the heroine of "The Snare" Gervaise Macquart, becomes an involuntary witness to a brutal murder. The events that follow not only change the course of his life but also awaken the heavy moral ailment inherited from previous generations of the family.
Another son of Gervaise, Etienne Lantier, is destined for a different fate. Sent by the author's will to a mining settlement in northern France, he becomes the central character of the novel "Germinal" - one of the most acute and revolutionary statements about the lives of working people in the history of world literature.