The Drinking Den: A Laundress's Fall

Gervaise Macquart is young, hardworking, and certain of one thing: she will never end up like her mother. Abandoned in a shabby Paris hotel by the man she loves and left with two small sons, she takes work as a laundress, saves every sou, and dares to dream of a shop of her own, a full larder, and a decent husband. When the gentle roofer Coupeau proposes, her future seems made. Then a fall from a rooftop, a returned old lover, and the slow poison of the neighborhood drinking den undo everything she has built. Warm-hearted but weak, industrious but proud, Gervaise slips by degrees from good fortune into debt, hunger, and ruin. Zola's masterpiece of everyday tragedy is retold here in vivid, present-day English that keeps every bitter and tender detail of one woman's long fall—and the fierce dignity she carries to the very end. Part of Timeless Classics.