Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Émile Zola's Doctor Pascal brings the Rougon-Macquart family story to Plassans in the early 1870s. Doctor Pascal has spent decades studying heredity through his own family, while his niece Clotilde, his mother Félicité, and the housekeeper Martine each challenge the life he has built around that work.

This English edition was translated by Mary J. Serrano. The novel moves between a doctor's study, the streets and homes of Plassans, and Paris, and asks how knowledge, belief, affection, and the past shape the lives still to come.