Germinal ..... one I should read

I have to confess I haven't read Emile Zola's  Germinal but after listening to Radio 4 today the book will be on my Christmas wish list.

The programme was the latest offering from the In Our Time series where "Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emile Zola's greatest literary success, his thirteenth novel in a series exploring the extended Rougon-Macquart family. 

The relative here is Etienne Lantier, already known to Zola’s readers as one of the blighted branch of the family tree and his story is set in Northern France. 

It opens with Etienne trudging towards a coalmine at night seeking work, and soon he is caught up in a bleak world in which starving families struggle and then strike, as they try to hold on to the last scraps of their humanity and the hope of change.

With, Susan Harrow, Ashley Watkins Chair of French at the University of Bristol, Kate Griffiths, Professor in French and Translation at Cardiff University and Edmund Birch,

Lecturer in French Literature and Director of Studies at Churchill College & Selwyn College, University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson"

Picture; Today - Unemployed, Labour Party Poster, 1923

*Germinal, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001rq08