Anna Karenina (1877) is a novel by Leo Tolstoy. What can I say about a book that has been hailed as the best novel ever written? Let's start with the obvious. It is a very big book set in 19th century Russian with lots of characters. It is, therefore, quite a daunting book. You will need time and patience to tackle reading it but you will be rewarded every step of the way. You probably expect (like I did) a novel about an unfaithful wife who runs away from a cold husband leaving her beloved child behind. While you will find that, you will also find that Tolstoy pays great attention to other characters and story lines that are in no way secondary to the story of Anna Karenina. In fact, after her suicide, the novel continues for a few hundred pages and does not lose any of its interest. In fact, the other protagonist of the book is for me its best character, Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin. But this novel is not so much about any individual characters as much as they are beautiful characterised by Tolstoy but about Russia as a changing nation. The leitmotiv of the moving train is very important in that respect, for instance: from children playing with a toy train at the beginning of the book through Anna's death by throwing herself in front of a real one. The train can be seen as an obvious symbol of material progress of Westernisation of Russia.
I know that I have not said anything new about the book and I have not mentioned many important aspects of it. I will just finish by saying this: do read it, it is a book that will stay with you.
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