La Faute de l'abbé Mouret

La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875) is the fifth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Viciously anticlerical in tone, it follows on from the horrific events at the end of La Conquête de Plassans, focussing this time on a remote Provençal backwater village.Unusually for Zola, the novel contains very few characters and locations, and its use of amnesia as a plot device gives it an unusually fantastical tone.