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  • Published: 1 April 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099540663
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 992
  • RRP: $19.99

Anna Karenina




'The greatest love story I've ever read' Andrew Davies


'The greatest love story I've ever read' Andrew Davies

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 extraordinary novel Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, while evoking a love so strong that those who experience it are prepared to die for it.

  • Published: 1 April 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099540663
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 992
  • RRP: $19.99

Other books in the series

On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born in central Russia in 1828. He studied Oriental languages and law (although failed to earn a degree in the latter) at the University of Kazan, and after a dissolute youth eventually joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus in 1851. He took part in the Crimean War, and the Sebastopol Sketches that emerged from it established his reputation. After living for some time in St Petersburg and abroad, he married Sophie Behrs in 1862 and they had thirteen children. The happiness this brought him gave him the creative impulse for his two greatest novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). Later in life his views became increasingly radical as he gave up his possessions to live a simple peasant life. After a quarrel with his wife he fled home secretly one night to seek refuge in a monastery. He became ill during this dramatic flight and died at the small railway station of Astapovo in 1910.

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Praise for Anna Karenina

One of the greatest love stories in world literature

Vladimir Nabokov

Tolstoy's historical and human sweep is breathtaking. His vision, humanity and his knowledge that love and pain are at the heart of life is the most important of all the profound truths revealed in this great novel

Jonathan Dimbleby

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy got totally inside the mind of a woman who is prepared to lose everything for the sake of man and who is so much in love that she commits suicide. I don't like her as a woman, but I think it is a brilliant portrait, unequalled in literature

Amanda Craig, Independent

I've read and re-read this novel and every time I find another layer in the story

Philippa Gregory

I first read Anna Karenina 20 years ago when travelling across the Peruvian desert on a long bus journey, and it has stayed with me ever since

Hugh Thomson, Independent

Anyone who has read Anna Karenina will be aware of its extraordinary power as an epic psychological tale of a woman who gives up her husband and son for the sake of an affair with a handsome army officer. It has humour but, as with all of Tolstoy's works, it is completely without sentimentality

Mail on Sunday

I just love this classic romance about a married mother who succumbs to an unsuitable lover and becomes pregnant by him, which of course results in all sorts of pressures and heartache. The best love story ever told

Kay Burley

Probably one of the greatest novelistic treatments of the torments of love

Daily Mail

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