"society"

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.