Books from France

1
The Red and the Black
Victor Hugo
Ambitious young Julien Sorel, the son of a carpenter in Restoration France, rises through society by means of his intelligence and hypocrisy, only to destroy himself through passion. One of the first great psychological novels.
1830
2
Germinal
Gustave Flaubert
Étienne Lantier arrives at a northern French coal mine and organises the exploited miners in a strike that ends in catastrophe. The thirteenth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle and his most powerful political work.
1885
3
Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
Antoine Roquentin, alone in a French port city, records a growing sense of disgust at the brute existence of things — people, objects, his own hands. Sartre's first novel and his most complete expression of existentialist philosophy in fiction.
1938
4
The Plague
Albert Camus
A bubonic plague descends on the Algerian city of Oran, and the townspeople struggle with confinement, fear, and death. Read as an allegory for the Nazi occupation, it is Camus's fullest statement of solidarity in the face of absurdity.
1947
5
The Stranger
Albert Camus
Meursault, a French Algerian, kills an Arab on a beach and faces trial — less for the murder than for his failure to weep at his mother's funeral. Camus's most celebrated novel, it introduced absurdism to a wide readership.
1942
6
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Victor Hugo
In 15th-century Paris, the deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo falls in love with the gypsy dancer Esmeralda, who is pursued by the corrupt archdeacon Frollo. Hugo used the novel partly to draw attention to the neglect of Gothic architecture.
1831
7
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Former convict Jean Valjean's decades-long pursuit by the relentless Inspector Javert frames a sweeping panorama of French society, poverty, and revolutionary struggle. One of the longest and most translated novels in French literature.
1862
8
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
A provincial doctor's wife, bored with her dull marriage, pursues romantic fantasies through adultery and extravagant spending, spiralling toward ruin. Flaubert was tried for obscenity upon publication; the novel is now seen as the masterpiece of literary realism.
1857