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NanaÉmile Zola

On the coverNana, Édouard Manet, 1877

Nana

1880 · France · Novel · ~430 pages

A beautiful, uneducated actress rises from the Paris gutter to become a courtesan who ruins every man who desires her, in Zola’s savage anatomy of a corrupt and doomed society. One of the great novels of the demimonde.

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Why read it

A lush, ferocious portrait of desire and decay in imperial Paris, glittering on the surface and rotten beneath. Zola at his most seductive and most damning.

Themes
SettingParis, 1860s

The pleasure-mad Paris of the Second Empire, all theatres, boudoirs, and racecourses, a golden surface over a society sliding toward collapse.

About the author

Émile Zola (1840–1902) made Nana a symbol of the rotten glamour of the Second Empire, part of his sweeping Rougon-Macquart cycle.