'Dostoyevsky's finest masterpiece' John BayleyDostoyevsky's great novel of damnation and redemption evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur. It tells the story of Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, who wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be beyond conventional moral laws. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat a...

Gabriel Grant thinks he's an ordinary 13-year old Londoner. But one day, something happens that leaves him with extraordinary abilities... Suddenly, there are people who want to use him for his powers. What is Gabriel's connection with a monastery in the distant Himalayas? Who is the mysterious Searcher, and can he be trusted? Who or what is spying on Gabriel? Why have his parents suddenly disappeared? And what does all this have to do with a visiting circus? In an adventure based in the h...

A brilliant modern translation by Christine Donougher of Victor Hugo's thrilling masterpiece, with an introduction by Robert Tombs.This is the best translation of the novel available in English, as recommended by David Bellos in The Novel of the Century.Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become...

'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 ...

Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party.As day turns to night, four hundred years' worth of memories unspool, and th...

Winner of the Nordic Council Prize for LiteratureThe second volume of the Booker-shortlisted masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.'Absolutely, absolutely incredible.' Karl Ove Knausgård'A total explosion.' Nicole Krauss'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz'Breathtaking.' Chetna Maroo'Brilliant.' Jon McGregor...

TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR & LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY'The old woman was merely a sickness . . .it wasn't a human being I killed, it was a principle!'A troubled young man commits the perfect crime - the murder of a vile pawnbroker whom no one will miss. Raskolnikov is desperate for money, but convinces himself that his motive for the murder is to benefit mankind. So begins one of the greatest novels ever written, a journey into the cri...

'no one pitied him as he would have liked to be pitied' As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' and the other works in this volume, Tolstoy conjures characters who, tested to the limit, reveal glorious and unexpected reserves of courage or baseness of a near inhuman kind. Two vivid parables and 'The Forged Coupon', a tale of criminality, explore class relations ...

Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by the hero's innocence, truthfulness, and humility betray the inadequacy of his moral idealism and disclose the spiritual emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate him. Myshkin's mission ends in idiocy and darkness, but it is the world that is rotten, not he. Written under appalling personal circumstances when D...

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 BBC RADIO 4 Book of the Week*'A fantastic achievement' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads'Bright, expansive, and iconoclastic, this deliciously witty book has the potential to upset the applecart of "Western Civilisation" itself... Magnificent' Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb**_________________A radical new account of how the idea of the West has shaped our history, told through the stories of fourteen fascinating lives.**We ...

A New York Review Books OriginalIn 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolita...