Paris

Paris, the last years of the nineteenth century. Abbé Pierre Froment says Mass each morning at Sacré-Cœur, but his faith has quietly died beneath him, leaving only the outward gestures of a priest who no longer believes. Sent on an errand of charity into the city's underbelly, he is drawn into the orbit of the Duvillards, a banking dynasty whose glittering townhouse conceals corruption, adultery, and a daughter's smoldering rebellion - and into the path of Salvat, a starving, blacklisted mechanic radicalized by hunger and injustice, carrying a bomb through the streets of Paris.

As a political scandal detonates in the press and the hunt for the bomber grips the city, Pierre is pulled between two worlds: the gilded corruption of the west and the desperate poverty of the east, between the God he has lost and the brother, Guillaume, he has not seen in years. Émile Zola's sweeping panorama of a city on the edge - its politicians, journalists, anarchists, and aristocrats - opens here, in a new translation that renders his naturalism vivid and immediate for contemporary readers.