Tolstoy's enthralling epic depicts Russia's war with Napoleon and its effects on the lives of those caught up in the conflict. He creates some of the most vital and involving characters in literature as he follows the rise and fall of families in St Petersburg and Moscow who are linked by their personal and political relationships.

This book tells the story of Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, who wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be beyond conventional moral laws.

Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds, and in love with the tender and beautiful nurse Lara.

Inspired by real events and centring on the figure of Pelageya Vlasova - the mother of the title - and her son Pavel, it describes the brutal life of ordinary Russian factory workers in the years leading to the 1905 Revolution and explores the rise of the proletariat, the role of women in society and the lower classes' struggle for self-affirmation.

Russias literary world is shaken to its foundations when a mysterious gentleman - a professor of black magic - arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a bizarre retinue of servants. It soon becomes clear that he is the Devil himself, come to wreak havoc among the cultural elite of a disbelieving capital.

Zuleikha is the model of a dutiful wife. While Russia reels in the aftermath of its recent revolution, life in her small Tatar village is relatively untouched, until the day her husband is executed by communist soldiers. Zuleikha is exiled to Siberia and forced to leave behind everything she knows.

It is December 1941, and eight-year-old Galina and her friend Vera are caught in the siege of Leningrad, eating wallpaper soup and dead rats. Galina's artist father Mikhail has been kept away from the front to help save the treasures of the Hermitage. Its cellars could provide a safe haven, as long as Mikhail can survive the perils of a commission from one of Stalin's colonels.