Crime and Punishment
Bantam Classics · first published 1866 · 576 pages
A poor former student in St. Petersburg commits a murder to test a theory about himself, then has to live with what he has done.
Fevered and crowded with talk, it stays inside one mind's spiraling arguments while moving through cramped stairways, taverns and sickrooms.
For a night too hot to sleep.
About this book
Raskolnikov has left his studies and lives in a tiny garret, behind on rent and full of a theory that exceptional people may step over moral lines. He kills an old pawnbroker, and from then on the book follows his fever, his evasions and his encounters with a patient investigator, a destitute family, and Sonya, a young woman with a quiet faith. The suspense lies less in who did it than in what his conscience will make of him.