This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. In the new Paris, everything is for sale—including family, honor, and flesh.

Aristide Saccard arrived in the capital with nothing but ambition and a willingness to profit from others' ruin. Now, as Baron Haussmann's demolition crews tear through medieval Paris to build an empire of boulevards and monuments, Saccard has positioned himself perfectly to feast on the carcass. Armed with insider knowledge and ruthless cunning, he speculates in real estate, manipulates property values, and grows rich on the destruction of the old city and the construction of the new.

But in this hothouse of luxury and moral vacancy, something darker blooms. Renée and Maxime—Saccard's son from his first marriage, barely younger than his stepmother—begin an affair that transforms the family into a stage for the era's ultimate transgression. Their incestuous passion, consummated among exotic flowers in a private conservatory, becomes both symptom and symbol of a world where all boundaries have been erased by money's universal solvent.

Émile Zola's most spectacular and unsettling novel is a fever dream of Second Empire Paris—a city reinventing itself through destruction, where financial speculation and sexual speculation mirror each other, where everything is simultaneously on display and for sale. With prose that glitters and corrupts in equal measure, Zola dissects the machinery of greed and the systematic monetization of human relationship.

Some cities are built. Paris was bought.

From the author of Germinal and Nana—a dazzling masterpiece of corruption, desire, and the price of everything.