|
|
Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > General
What would you do to inherit a million dollars? Would you be
willing to change your life? Jason Stevens is about to find out.
Red Stevens has died, and the older members of his family receive
their millions with greedy anticipation. But a different fate
awaits young Jason, whom his great-uncle Stevens believed might be
the last vestige of hope in the family. "Although to date your life
seems to be a sorry excuse for anything I would call promising,
there does seem to be a spark of something in you that I hope we
can fan into a flame. For that reason, I am not making you an
instant millionaire." What Stevens does give Jason leads to The
Ultimate Gift. Young and old will take this timeless tale to heart.
Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction and Notes by
Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury. Crime and
Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever
written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied
consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is
inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder. From that moment
on, we share his conflicting feelings of self-loathing and pride,
of contempt for and need of others, and of terrible despair and
hope of redemption: and, in a remarkable transformation of the
detective novel, we follow his agonised efforts to probe and
confront both his own motives for, and the consequences of, his
crime. The result is a tragic novel built out of a series of
supremely dramatic scenes that illuminate the eternal conflicts at
the heart of human existence: most especially our desire for
self-expression and self-fulfilment, as against the constraints of
morality and human laws; and our agonised awareness of the world's
harsh injustices and of our own mortality, as against the mysteries
of divine justice and immortality.
|
|