LAssommoir, Emile Zola
LAssommoir, Emile Zola
List: $39.00 | Sale: $27.30
Club: $19.50

L'Assommoir
The Drinking Den

Author: Emile Zola

Narrator: Leighton Pugh

Unabridged: 15 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/01/2019

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

Brutal, gripping and heart-wrenching, L'Assommoir (also known as The Drinking Den) chronicles the tragic downward spiral of Gervaise Macquart, a good-natured and hardworking laundress who slides into alcoholism and despair. After her lover abandons her and their two children, Gervaise marries a tin worker, Coupeau, who helps her rebuild her life. She starts her own business and the two have a daughter, Anna (the protagonist of Zola's later novel, Nana). But their happiness is short-lived as a freak accident leaves Coupeau seriously injured, beginning the family's fall into alcohol, desperation and violence. Disturbingly realistic, L'Assommoir is a vivid portrayal of life in late 19th-century Paris.

Reviews

Goodreads review by MJ on October 16, 2011

Whenever I think I had a rough upbringing I read a book like this and realise I am a fluffed little pillow of good fortune. I was raised in a council tenement in a backwater semi-village in Central Scotland amid a backdrop of Protestant activism and spinster gossiping. But compared to Zola’s Paris i......more

Goodreads review by Alex on May 13, 2010

Don't actually remember when I read this, it was sometime just after college. I had read Nana for a class and needed to follow it up. As I write this blurb I'm belatedly following up L'Assommoir with Germinal. You really can't lose with Zola. Unless you're one of his characters, in which case you'll......more