Paris, 1860. Claude is a poor, idealistic young intellectual, newly arrived from the provinces, sustaining himself on almost nothing while he pursues the literary ambitions that brought him to the capital. When a young prostitute named Laurence has nowhere else to go, he takes her in - not out of desire, but out of a young man's conviction, inherited from the Romantic literature he has been raised on, that devotion and moral seriousness might be enough to redeem a woman the world has already condemned.

It is not enough.

Claude's Confession was Émile Zola's first novel, published in Paris in 1865 when he was twenty-five years old, unknown, and struggling to survive as a freelance critic. Written as a series of increasingly anguished letters, it was conceived as a direct answer to the great Romantic tales of the fallen woman redeemed by love - and it offers, instead, the brutal truth Zola believed those stories concealed: that virtue is not simply a matter of will, that Paris does not reward innocence, and that the distance between what a young idealist expects from love and what he actually receives is where real disillusionment begins.

Banned in the United States and Great Britain for its frank treatment of sexuality and prostitution, and untranslated into English for well over a century, Claude's Confession is the first appearance of the unflinching, unsentimental vision that would make its young author the founder of literary Naturalism and the creator of the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle.

By Émile Zola. His first novel - the key to everything that followed.