This new translation is an accurate and stylish rendering of Zola's original, which was first published in 1880.

The Masterpiece is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it provides a unique insight into his career as a writer and his relationship with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence. It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemian world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despite the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted Germinal! Germinal! The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts — a strike which becomes a losing battle against starvation, repression, and sabotage. Yet despite all the violence and disillusion which rock the mining community to its foundations, Lantier retains his belief in the ultimate germination of a new society, leading to a better world. Germinal is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, but it is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigour and power in this new translation.

«L'histoire d'un immeuble dans le Paris embelli, polic?, moralis?, rentabilis? par la r?volution hausmannienne. Le propri?taire, les locataires, le terrible concierge, des employ?s «r?sign?s comme des chevaux de man?ge», un architecte qui trompe sa femme, deux ou trois femmes hyst?riques, des gamines vicieuses, des «troupeaux de demoiselles ? marier», des th?s musicaux: pas de drame mais la m?nagerie sociale d'une ?poque au grand complet, «la pourriture d'une maison bourgeoise, des caves au grenier». Et, derri?re le d?cor «Beaux-Arts» de la fa?ade, le trou infect de la cour o? la «rancune de la domesticit?» vomit «les ordures cach?es des familles». «Toutes les baraques se ressemblent, conclut l'une des bonnes. C'est cochon et compagnie».»