The Beast Within

A superb new translation of one of the most intense and explicit works of the nineteenth-century French master ...mile Zola considered The Beast Within-also known as La Bête Humaine-to be his "most finely worked" novel. This new translation finally captures his fast- paced yet deliberately dispassionate style. Set at the end of the Second Empire, when French society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new railways and locomotives it was building, The Beast Within is at once a tale of murder, passion, and possession and a compassionate study of individuals derailed by the burden of inherited evil. In it, Zola expresses the hope that human nature evolves through education but warns that the beast within continues to lurk beneath the veneer of technological progress.

Émile Zola (1840-1902) is a French novelist and critic and the founder of the Naturalist movement in literature, which he defined as "nature seen through a temperament."
Roger Whitehouse is the translator of the Penguin Classics edition of Gustave Flaubert's Three Tales. He has taught at the Sorbonne.