Anna Karenina comes in at just over a tremendous eight hundred pages. Having on a previous occasion read some four hundred of those pages I can now assert with confidence that all eight hundred are indispensable.

By some this is accounted Tolstoy’s masterpiece. I am not sure that I did not enjoy War and Peace more, but objectively (bearing in mind that it’s been a few years since I did the War and Peace thing) I believe that Anna Karenina has more to offer. In this peace-time novel Tolstoy brings out the really big guns. A tighter novel (despite its great length) the focus is turned minutely and unrelentingly on the characters, with remarkable results.
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