Revolution & Change

Accounts of upheaval, social change, and new beginnings.

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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.

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, the novel follows lawyer Sydney Carton's self-sacrifice for the woman he loves. Famous for its opening line and one of the best-selling novels of all time.

United Kingdom 1859

The animals of Manor Farm overthrow their human farmer, only to find the pigs gradually becoming indistinguishable from their former oppressors. A precise allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalinist betrayal.

United Kingdom 1945

Les Misérables

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.

Boris Pasternak

A physician and poet witnesses the Russian Revolution and civil war, torn between two women and his artistic vocation. The Soviet government suppressed the novel; it was first published in Italy and won Pasternak the Nobel Prize he was forced to decline.

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