In Our Time: Germinal

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emile Zola's Germinal - greatest literary success and 13th novel in a series exploring the extended Rougon-Macquart family. The plot is set in a French miners' strike, with Etienne trudging towards a coalmine at night seeking work. He is soon caught up in a bleak world in which starving families struggle as they try to hold on to the last scraps of their humanity and the hope of change