Bookrate

'Will I really - I mean, really - actually take an axe, start hitting her on the head, smash her skull to pieces . . . Will I slip in warm sticky blood, break the lock, steal and tremble; and hide, all drenched in blood . . . with an axe . . . Lord, will I really?' This new translation of Dostoyevsky's 'psychological record of a crime' gives his dark masterpiece of murder and pursuit a renewed vitality, expressing its jagged, staccato urgency and fevered atmosphere as never before. 'Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.' Virginia Woolf