Best Classics Books

Prince Lev Myshkin returns to Russia after years of Swiss treatment for epilepsy — gentle, sincere, and incapable of the social calculus that governs everyone around him. Dostoevsky's attempt to portray a truly good man, and what happens when such a man meets the world.

The mythological history of Middle-earth, from the creation of the world by the god-like Ainur through the ages of the Elves, the forging of the Silmarils, and the great wars of the First Age — assembled posthumously by Christopher Tolkien from his father's lifelong writings.

Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov recognises, as a juror at a murder trial, the woman he seduced and abandoned years before. Overcome by guilt, he follows Katyusha Maslova through the Russian prison and exile system — a journey that becomes Tolstoy's most sustained indictment of the state, the church, and the landed class.