Germinal

Zola’s thirteenth Rougon-Macquart novel, published in 1885. Étienne Lantier arrives at a northern French coal town, takes work underground, and helps lead a strike that starves the miners into defeat. Zola went down a pit and interviewed miners before writing it, and the result is the most powerful nineteenth-century novel about industrial labour, unsparing about the owners and about what hunger does to the strikers.