The Gin Palace is the seventh novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, about two branches of a French family traced through several generations. Introducing one of the most sympathetic heroines in nineteenth-century literature, it is also the work that made his reputation.

Abandoned by her lover and left to bring up their two children alone, Gervaise Macquart has to fight to earn an honest living. When she accepts the marriage proposal of Monsieur Coupeau, it seems as though she is on the path to a decent, respectable life at last. But with her husband's drinking and the unexpected appearance of a figure from her past, Gervaise's plans begin to unravel tragically.

Emile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, raised at Aix-en-Provence in a poor family whose father died seven years after his birth. Zola was educated at the College Bourbon at Aix, and at the Lycee Saint-Louis in Paris, but upon failing his baccalaureat in 1859 began working as a clerk. In the mid 1860s he decided to support himself by literature alone. After publishing several of his great masterworks, in 1868 Zola began his incredible series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, consisting of over twenty fictions intended to reveal scientifically the effects of heredity and environment on one family; it is one of the chief monuments of the French Naturalist Movement and includes some of Zola's best writing. Zola died in 1902.