Thérèse Raquin

Thérèse has been married off to her sickly cousin Camille and lives with him and his mother in a gloomy shop in a Paris arcade. When Camille brings home his robust friend Laurent, Thérèse and Laurent begin an affair, and during a boating trip on the Seine they drown Camille and make it look like an accident. Their freedom turns into a nightmare of guilt, under the silent eyes of Camille's paralysed mother.

Published in 1867, it was Zola's first great success and a scandal; in his preface he defended it as a scientific study of temperament. It is short, dark and gripping, a psychological thriller before the term existed. Read Germinal for Zola's mature work.

Émile Zola (1840–1902) grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where his best friend was the future painter Cézanne, and worked as a clerk for a Paris publisher before becoming a journalist and novelist. He planned and wrote a cycle of twenty novels following one family under the Second Empire, including Germinal and Nana.

In 1898 his open letter 'J'accuse...!' defended the wrongly convicted Captain Dreyfus and forced him into exile in England. He died in 1902, poisoned by fumes from a blocked chimney, and his remains were later moved to the Panthéon. Thérèse Raquin was his first success.