Nana

She rises from the gutters of Paris to become the most desired woman in the city, and then she rots. Nana is Zola's devastating portrait of a courtesan whose beauty becomes a weapon of mass destruction, devouring everyone in her orbit. Born Anna Coupeau to an alcoholic mother, she transforms herself into the most sought-after demimondaine in Paris, seducing aristocrats and bankers with her feral sexuality until she collapses from smallpox in a hotel room, her face a mass of putrefying flesh. The novel functions as an autopsy of Second Empire society, revealing the rot beneath the glamour of Parisian nightlife. Zola spares nothing in his naturalistic gaze: the theater world is a carnival of parasites, money flows like venom, and Nana herself is both predator and prey, a girl who never learned to want anything but destruction. This is brutal, unflinching literature that refuses to look away from the ugly truth of how societies create and discard their women.