> Skip to content
  • Published: 30 January 2008
  • ISBN: 9780140449631
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $22.99

The Beast Within




New translation by Roger Whitehouse for this tale of murder, passion, and possession

La Bete humaine (1890), the seventeenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion, and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his 'most finely worked' novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within.

  • Published: 30 January 2008
  • ISBN: 9780140449631
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $22.99

Other books in the series

On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Emile Zola

Émile Zola (1840-1902) was the leading figure in the French school of naturalistic fiction. His principal work, Les Rougon-Macquart, is a panorama of mid-19th century French life, in a cycle of 20 novels which Zola wrote over a period of 22 years.

Also by Emile Zola

See all