The Black Sheep
by Honore de Balzac | 
Cousin Pons
by Honore de Balzac | 
The Chouans
by Honore de Balzac | 
The Man Who Laughs
by Victor Hugo | 
Lucien Leuwen
by Stendhal | 
Strong as Death
by Guy de Maupassant | 
The Lily of the Valley
by Honore de Balzac | 
Lost Illusions
by Honore de Balzac |
The Kill
by Emile Zola |
A Harlot High and Low
by Honore de Balzac | 
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
by Victor Hugo |
Colonel Chabert
by Honore de Balzac |
The Beast Within
by Emile Zola | 
Bouvard and Pecuchet
by Gustave Flaubert | 
The Ladies' Paradise
by Emile Zola | 
Orphan Train
by Christina Baker Kline | 
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon | 
The Invention of Wings
by Sue Monk Kidd | 
Year of Wonders
by Geraldine Brooks | 
The Storyteller
by Jodi Picoult |
Conservative and working-class, Jean Macquart is an experienced, middle-aged soldier in the French army, who has endured deep personal loss. When he first meets the wealthy and mercurial Maurice Levasseur, who never seems to have suffered, his hatred is immediate. But after they are thrown together during the disastrous Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, the pair are compelled to understand one other. Forging a profound friendship, they must struggle together to endure a disorganised and brutal war, the savage destruction of France's Second Empire and the fall of Napoleon III. One of the greatest of all war novels, The Debacle is the nineteenth novel in Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle. A forceful and deeply moving tale of close friendship, it is also a fascinating chronicle of the events that were to lead, in the words of Zola himself, to 'the murder of a nation'.