Summer in Baden-Baden

Join Dostoevsky on his tumultuous honeymoon in this hypnotic cult classic , introduced by Susan Sontag. `A wonderful work of art.` Jon McGregor `Extraordinary in its confidence and enchantment.` Chris Power `Addictive, dreamlike and dazzlingly unique.` Adam Thirlwell `Luminous, melancholy and enraptured.` Chloe Aridjis Why was I reading this book now, in a railway-carriage, beneath a wavering, flickering, electric light-bulb . . Summer, 1867: The newlywed Dostoevsky and his young wife Anna - his one-time secretary - are travelling to the German spa resort of Baden-Baden on honeymoon. Their love is ecstatic, yet the author is plagued by demons: haunted by his crimes and punishments, consumed by fevers of jealousy, gambling to avoid mounting debts and shaken by epileptic fits. Winter, 1970s: Our Jewish narrator embarks on a pilgrimage from Moscow to Leningrad to trace the footsteps of his literary hero. As the train travels across the Soviet Union`s bleak expanses, he immerses himself in Anna`s travel journal: and their journeys - past and present, real and imagined - soon become entwined. The result of a clandestine literary vocation, Summer in Baden-Badenwas smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1981 and first published in a Russian émigré weekly in the USA. It has since been hailed as a trailblazing modern classic, translated into more than twenty languages - and its hypnotic, enigmatic power only grows.