Read The Master and Margarita

Dostoevsky's tense moral descent of a guilty student (1866).

The timeless falling-blocks puzzle (1984).

Tolstoy's epic of Russia in the Napoleonic age (1869).

A lawyer follows a clockwork trail to a lost island of mammoths; Benoit Sokal's art.

Zamyatin's 1921 glass city of numbers; the book Orwell and Huxley both borrowed from.

A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".

Three brothers, a murdered father and the Grand Inquisitor; Dostoevsky's last novel.

Prince Myshkin, too good for Petersburg society, and the woman two men destroy.