Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140621806 ISBN 13: 9780140621808

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1997

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.

Review:

"Dostoevsky makes Martin Amis seem as if he was writing 130 years ago and that Dostoevsky is writing now. Read all of Dostoevsky. These books are for now and they matter, because it's up to us to call a halt to our TV producers, politicians, gutless artists, poets and writers: these "teenagers of all ages" who are propelling us towards a consumerist hell of disposability over quality" (Billy Childish)

"Dostoevsky's finest masterpiece" (John Bayley)

"Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Henry James - these are the great psychologists - far greater than Freud or Klein or Jung" (Sally Vickers)

"The best translation of Crime and Punishment currently available... An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it" (Washington Post)

"Crime and Punishment...is about a big subject - the meaning of life - yet it is gritty, gripping and it's depiction of city life gives it a modern, timeless feel" (Leila Aboulela, author of The Translator)

Book Description:

A pocket hardback of Dostoevsky's literary masterpiece.