Therese Raquin

Married off to her sickly cousin Camille by a domineering aunt, Thérèse Raquin lives a suffocated life in a dim little shop in a Paris passage. Beneath her passive surface burns a fierce, thwarted nature—one that ignites when she meets Laurent, her husband's coarse, sensual friend. Their affair is immediate and consuming, and it drives them to a terrible decision: to be free of Camille for good.

But the murder they imagine will liberate them instead binds them together in horror. Haunted by guilt and by the memory of the man they killed, Thérèse and Laurent find their desire curdling into loathing, their nerves fraying, their nights unbearable. Zola dissects their disintegration with the cold eye of a scientist studying specimens.

One of Émile Zola's earliest and most notorious novels, Thérèse Raquin is a dark, unflinching study of temperament, remorse, and the physical toll of a crime that cannot be undone—an early landmark of literary naturalism. Translated from the French.