A gripping true crime story and an insight into the motivations of a truly evil man, Babes in the Wood by Graham Bartlett with Peter James is a fascinating account of what became a thirty-two year fight for justice.On 9 October 1986, nine-year-olds Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway went out to play on their Brighton estate. They would never return home; their bodies discovered the next day concealed in a local park. This devastating crime rocked the country...

When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naive son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father by criticizing the landowning way of life and by his outspoken determination to sweep away traditional values of contemporary Russian society. Turgenev's depiction of the conflict between g...

Anna Karenina is a novel of unparalleled richness and complexity, set against the backdrop of Russian high society. Tolstoy charts the course of the doomed love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer who pursues Anna after becoming infatuated with her at a ball. Although she initially resists his charms Anna eventually succumbs, falling passionately in love and setting in motion a chain of events that lead to her downfall. In this...

'The most magnificent novel ever written' Sigmund FreudThe murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, driven to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family's rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. Dostoyevsky's dark masterwork evokes ...

Chosen for the Duchess of Cornwall's online book club The Reading Room by HRH The Prince of WalesWhen William Blacker first crossed the snow-bound passes of northern Romania, he stumbled upon an almost medieval world.There, for many years he lived side by side with the country people, a life ruled by the slow cycle of the seasons, far away from the frantic rush of the modern world. In spring as the pear trees blossomed he ploughed with horses, in s...

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human ...

A selection of the finest stories by this female ChekhovTeffi's genius with the short form made her a literary star in pre-revolutionary Russia, beloved by Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin alike. These stories, taken from the whole of her career, show the full range of her gifts. Extremely funny-a wry, scathing observer of society-she is also capable, as capable even as Chekhov, of miraculous subtlety and depth of character.There are stories here from her own life (as a c...

At the beginning of the story, walking along an incline, some of Tolstoy’s characters lie, commit robberies and even killings. The author allows his heroes to experience feelings of satisfaction and complete impunity, after they have committed terrible atrocities. Pelageyushkin, going to the massacres, is content with one own impunity. Tolstoy conducts his heroes in hellish circles: all terrible crimes are uncovered. The punishment for the crime hangs with a „Damocles sword” over the heads...

The Double is a novella written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published on January 30, 1846 in the Fatherland Notes. The Double centers on a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, who repeatedly encounters someone who is his exact double in appearance but confident, aggressive, and extroverted, characteristics ...

Now a BBC Radio 4 Book at BedtimeThe debut novel from award-winning author of Black Earth City: A Year in the Heart of Russia.When twenty-two-year-old Gerty Freely travels to Russia to work as a governess in early 1914, she has no idea of the vast political upheavals ahead, nor how completely her fate will be shaped by them.In 1917, revolution sweeps away the Moscow Gerty knew. The middle classes - and their governesses - a...

The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1870) is a compact yet searing psychological novella that delves into the labyrinthine complexities of human relationships and inner torment. In true Dostoyevskian fashion, the narrative unfolds through a series of confessional monologues and charged encounters that reveal the protagonist's struggle with the relentless ghosts of his past. At its core, the work explores the inescapable interplay between lo...

This collection, unique to the Modern Library, gathers seven of Dostoevsky's key works and shows him to be equally adept at the short story as with the novel. Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic White Nights, an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous Notes from the Underground, a story of guilt, ineffectiveness, and uncompromising cynicis...