• A fascinating novel which in which the introduction highlights the modernity of the themes of the novel -the disparity between classes, the power struggle between the sexes, the treatment of women
• Excellent new translation by Helen Constantine, well known for her editions of Paris Tales (OUP, 2004) and French Tales (OUP, 2008) and translations of Zola, Gautier, and Balzac for Penguin and Oxford World's Classics
• Introduction and notes by Brian Nelson, the formidable translator of many Zola editions for Oxford World's Classics including The Fortune of the Rougons, The Ladies' Paradise, His Excellency Eugène Rougon, The Belly of Paris, and The Kill
• Includes an up-to-date bibliography, chronology of the author, and helpful explanatory notes

  
'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.'
    
Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress. Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and extravagance, just as the disastrous war with Prussia is declared.
     
Nana is the ninth instalment in the twenty volume Rougon-Macquart series. The novel opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan élite, was la Ville Lumière, the glittering setting-and object-of Zola's scathing denunciation of society's hypocrisy and moral corruption. Nana comes to symbolize the Second Empire regime itself in all its excesses; but in the final chapters, the narrator seems to suggest that the coming disaster not so much as a result of the corruption of the Empire, as of rampant female sexuality.