War and Peace (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

It may sound pretentious, or strange, but I can remember the weeks (three weeks, to be precise) I spent reading War and Peace as a peak experience of sustained excitement and deep delight. Part of the delight was the largeness and strangeness of this world - the sense of the vastness and extremes of Russia, the unboundedness of everything

Finacial Times

It is simply the greatest novel ever written. All human life is in it. If I were told there was time to read only a single book, this would be it

Andrew Marr

There is a good argument to say that any decent library must make room for War and Peace

Independent on Sunday

War and Peace... is gleefully experimental... Tolstoy is the greatest miniaturist in the history of the novel. He is economical... [An] outlandish, wonderful novel

Adam Thirwell, Guardian

In War And Peace, richly observed human life - its catastrophes and passions, its thrills and tedium - mark out Tolstoy as a fox, who knows all about the dizzying diversity of existence

Observer

If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it

The Times

This is, at last, a translation of War and Peace without the dreadful misunderstandings and "improvements" that plague all other translations of the novel into English. Pevear and Volokhonsky's supple and compelling translation is the closest that an English reader without Russian can get to Tolstoy's masterwork. This is a great achievement. It is hard to imagine how this translation could be superseded."

Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures,

To read him . . . is to find one's way home . . . to everything within us that is fundamental and sane

Thomas Mann

Reveals Tolstoy in his majestic scope and precision to this reader for the first time, unencumbered by the pidgin archaisms of previous translations, ringing with mastery and truth

Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

Wonderfully readable

Wendy Cope, The Week

Highly and deservedly praised...is a remarkable achievement.

Contemporary Review

Translators give their wits and craft selflessly in service of others' work; this is a triumph of fidelity and unpretentiousness.

The Independent

The greatest of all novels. Read it again, to test and savour the infallible truth of Tolstoy’s understanding of every stage and aspect of human life

Alan Hollinghurst, New York Times