One of the greatest novels ever written, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina opens with one of literature's most famous lines and unfolds into a panoramic portrait of Russian society in the 1870s. At its center is Anna, a beautiful, intelligent aristocrat trapped in a respectable but loveless marriage, who risks everything for a passionate affair with the dashing cavalry officer Count Vronsky — and finds that society will forgive the man but destroy the woman.
Woven against Anna's tragedy is the parallel story of Konstantin Levin, a landowner searching for meaning in work, faith, family and the soil, whose quiet, hard-won contentment stands in luminous contrast to Anna's ruin. Between them, Tolstoy assembles a vast cast — husbands and wives, lovers and children, city and country — to examine marriage, fidelity, class, and the search for a life worth living.
Sweeping yet intimate, morally searching and psychologically exact, Anna Karenina is a masterpiece of realism that asks how, and whether, we can be both honest and happy.
