Germinal

Considered by André Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Émile Zola's Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty and wretchedness of a mining community in northern France, translated with an introduction by Roger Pearson in Penguin Classics.
Étienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Compelled to take a back-breakin job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow m