This is just one book in Zola's 20-volume Rougons-Macquart cycle, his magnum opus which traces the fortunes of different branches of the same family throughout the great upheavals of 19th century France, but it got good reviews so it's the first one I read. Zola has a fantastic eye for detail in addition to his amusingly dated theories of congenital sin (the main character gets crazy when he's drunk just like his ancestors, and the other characters also have sins-of-the-father inheritances that prove something or other), and so his characters inhabit an incredibly entertaining world in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, where the protagonists battle through their love triangle while also caught in the grips of an epic coal strike. Germinal (named after a springtime month in the French Revolutionary Calendar that also signifies rebirth) reads a great deal like Upton Sinclair's masterpiece The Jungle, right down to the personal crises of the main character and the triumphalist political messaging at the end, but with French coal miners instead of Chicago meat-packers. I don't know if I'll ever track down all 19 of the rest of the series, but this was a great novel even in translation.
