Earth

''Only the earth is immortal...the earth we love enough to commit murder for her.''Zola''s novel of peasant life, the fifteenth in the Rougon-Macquart series, is generally regarded as one of his finest achievements, comparable to Germinal and L''Assommoir. Set in a village in the Beauce, in northern France, it depicts the harshness of the peasants'' world and their visceral attachment to the land....