“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

So begins the classic story of tragic adulterous love that has thrilled readers for over a century. Anna, miserable in her loveless marriage, does the barely thinkable and succumbs to her desires for the dashing Count Vronsky. Tolstoy intertwines the lives of many characters in Anna Karenina creating an intricate labyrinth of connections that is an adventure in reading. Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared the novel "flawless as a work of art." His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired "the magic of Tolstoy's style," and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as "the best ever written." The book remains popular, as demonstrated by a 2007 poll of 125 contemporary authors in Time, which declared that Anna Karenina is the "greatest novel ever written."

"One of the greatest love stories in world literature."
- Vladimir Nabokov.