Nana. Earth

Émile Zola — one of the pillars of world realistic literature, founder and theorist of naturalism, an enthusiastic researcher of everyday life, passionate human rights advocate and publicist, who influenced all realistic literature of the 20th century. His most famous work is the epochal twenty-volume cycle "Les Rougon-Macquart," which reveals to the reader an endless panorama of human vices and virtues against the backdrop of the Second Empire. It is a true encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces, depicted through several generations of a family that bore the strangest fruits.
This illustrated edition includes the novels "Nana" and "Earth," which occupy the seventeenth and eighteenth places in the cycle, according to the order prescribed by the author.
For the first time, Nana, the heroine of the eponymous novel (1880), was introduced to readers as a little girl in the novel "L'Assommoir" (1877). Years passed, and this girl transformed into a luscious blonde beauty, embodying the ideal of triumphant femininity at the end of the century. The past is forgotten, and gold flows like a river through the fingers of the corrupt daughter of the Parisian streets, and the powerful of this world consider it a fortune to bow at her feet…
The action of the novel "Earth" takes place in a rural community where another offspring of the family — Jean Macquart — attempts to settle. The people living here are true laborers who tirelessly cultivate their land and return to it when the time comes. However, even this close-knit world, located far from the bustling life of Paris, is subject to the universal vices of human society…