Leo Tolstoy

“From a Petersburg drawing room in 1805 to the burning of Moscow and the retreat of Napoleon's army, the lives of three noble families — the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys and the awkward heir Pierre Bezukhov — are swept up in war, love, loss and the search for what makes a life worth living.”

“A beautiful Petersburg wife meets a young cavalry officer at a Moscow railway station and gives up her husband, her son and her place in society for him, while across the same Russia a shy landowner, Levin, courts the girl who once refused him and searches for a reason to live.”

“Sitting on a jury in Moscow, Prince Nekhlyudov recognises in the dock the young woman he seduced and abandoned years before, now a prostitute accused of poisoning; when she is wrongly sent to Siberia, he resolves to follow her and atone, and discovers the cruelty of the whole world he belongs to.”