The Soil (La terre.) A Realistic Novel

Émile Zola wrote a book called The Soil: A Realistic Novel. The book is part of a twenty-novel series called Les Rougon-Macquart that looks at the social and political situation in France during the Second Empire. The Soil is a sad and dark story about life in the French countryside in the second half of the 1800s. The main characters in the book are the Fouan family, who live in a small town in northern France and work as farmers. The characters are shown to be desperate and cruel in their...