Few novels have been so completely absorbed into literary culture while remaining so endlessly alive.

First published in serial form between 1875 and 1877, Anna Karenina moves between drawing rooms, railway stations, country estates and city salons to examine love, marriage, desire, faith, family and the quiet structures that govern ordinary life. While Anna's doomed affair with Count Vronsky provides the novel's emotional centre, Tolstoy continually broadens the frame, balancing her story against Levin's search for meaningful work, belief and domestic happiness. 

The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation has become one of the defining modern English editions, preserving the rhythms, repetitions and tonal shifts of Tolstoy's Russian while restoring much of the novel's conversational immediacy. What continues to distinguish Anna Karenina is its refusal to reduce its characters to symbols or moral lessons: everyone is contradictory, capable of tenderness and selfishness in the same breath. More than a nineteenth-century classic, it remains one of literature's greatest studies of intimacy, conscience and the difficult business of trying to live well.

Penguin Classics paperback (2006 anniversary edition). Pevear & Volokhonsky translation. Light shelf wear with a clean, tightly bound interior.