One of Neary's top ten books about guilt, as shared at the Guardian:Crime and Punishment by Fyodor DostoevskyRead about the other entries on the list.
Raskolnikov considers the guilt that wracks him to be a form of weakness. Would a superman like Napoleon torture himself over such a paltry act as the murder of a pawnbroker and her sister? In attempting to evade his guilt, he succeeds only in shunting it off into his unconscious, where it surfaces in the dreamtime visitations of Alonya’s taunting ghost. The wily detective Porfiry warns him that the law of nature dictates that he will either be driven mad or obliged to confess. And so it turns out.
Crime and Punishment is among Becky Ferreira's seven best comeuppances in literature, Lorraine Kelly's six best books, the top ten works of literature according to Norman Mailer, Gerald Scarfe's six best books, and Andrew Klavan's five best psychological crime novels. Elmore Leonard has never read beyond page fifty of the tome.
--Marshal Zeringue