Anna Karenina is the sweeping love story of two people who defy the conventions of their age to follow the dictates of their hearts. Trapped in a stifling marriage, Anna is swept off her feet by the dashing Count Vronsky. When the truth about their passionate liaison comes out, Anna's husband is more concerned with keeping up appearances than anything else, but at last he seeks a reluctant divorce. Rejected by society, the two lovers flee to Italy, where Anna finds herself isolated from all except the man she loves, and who loves her. But can they live by love alone? In this novel of astonishing scope and grandeur, Leo Tolstoy, the great master of Russian literature, charts the course of the human heart.

Lev Nikolayevich, Count Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoy), was born of an aristocratic Russian family in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate some 200 miles south of Moscow. He served in the army during the Crimean War, an experience that gave rise to tales including 'The Raid' (1853) and the three stories that make up Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6). In 1859 his first novel, Family Happiness, was published. In 1862 he married, and soon thereafter — although he published The Cossacks in 1863 — he began work on his great novel War and Peace (1865-69). Not content to rest on his laurels after that towering achievement, he next wrote Anna Karenina (1875-7). He advocated what could be regarded as a new sect, whose tenets, including pacifism (his ideas in this respect were precursors of Gandhi's non-violent resistance) and something close to anarchism, led to many of his later works being banned by the Russian censors. He died in 1910.