Crime and Punishment

A compelling story of a brutal double murder and its aftermath. An impoverished ex-student, Raskolnikov, kills a pawnbroker and her sister, apparently for financial gain. But as he encounters friends and family, strangers and adversaries, Raskolnikov is compelled to face the true forces that have led him to murder. His struggle with himself and those around him becomes a battle of the individual against society, radicalism against tradition, and ultimately the will of man against the mysteries of divine providence. A sensation in its day, Crime and Punishment has left an indelible stamp on the world of literature. Translated by Constance Garnett, with an afterword by Oliver Francis.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821 and studied in St Petersburg. His first work of fiction was the epistolary novel Poor Folk (1846), which met with a generally favorable response, but his subsequent works in the same period were less enthusiastically received. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of the socialist Petrashevsky circle and suffered four years in a Siberian penal settlement followed by another four years of enforced military service. He returned to writing in the late 1850s, and it was during the last twenty years of his life that he wrote the iconic works, Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). He died in 1881.