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Thérèse is married off to her sickly cousin Camille and installed behind the counter of a dim haberdashery in a covered Paris arcade, where the days pass in silence broken only by the Thursday domino games. Then Camille brings home a friend from work — Laurent, coarse, idle and physically overwhelming — and within weeks Thérèse is conducting an affair in the room above the shop. The two of them decide that Camille must drown.

What follows is not a crime novel but a clinical study of what the murder does to them. Zola said he set out to examine two human animals the way a surgeon examines a corpse, and the second half of the book is one of the most relentless descriptions of guilt in fiction: the sleeplessness, the physical revulsion, the mark on Laurent's neck that will not heal, and the paralysed old woman in the corner who works out what they have done and cannot speak.

Published in 1867 when Zola was twenty-seven, it caused a scandal and made his name. It remains the purest demonstration of his conviction that character is physiology and environment, followed to its conclusion without mercy. This is an unabridged recording of a fresh modern translation.