"literary canon"

1869 · Leo Tolstoy · 1225 pages · Historical Fiction

War and Peace is the book that earned its reputation. Tolstoy wrote something that defied classification when it was published and still does, a novel that contains some of the most psychologically precise character writing in any language alongside philosophical digressions that will try the patience of any reader who reaches for them. The length is real. The commitment is real. But so is the payoff: characters who feel more alive than most people you actually know, and a portrait of how individual lives intersect with the forces of history that nobody has matched since. It rewards the investment more completely than almost any other novel ever written.

1878 · Leo Tolstoy · 964 pages · Literary Fiction

Anna Karenina is the novel that Tolstoy himself called his first true novel, and you can feel the difference between this and everything that came before it. The dual structure of Anna's tragic affair and Levin's quieter search for meaning creates a book that is simultaneously a devastating love story and a philosophical investigation into how people should live. The Levin chapters will divide readers as sharply now as they did in the 1870s. But Anna's psychological unraveling is rendered with a precision that remains unmatched in fiction, and the opening line's promise that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way turns out to be the organizing principle of one of the richest novels ever written.