Returning to St Petersburg from a sanatorium, the gentle Prince Myshkin - known as 'the idiot' pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utterly infatuated, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of black-mail, betrayal and, finally, murder. In Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky portrays the purity of 'a truly beautiful soul' and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world.

David McDuff's new translation brilliantly captures the novel's dream-like language and the elliptic flow of the narrative. In his introduction, William Mills Todd III examines the pressures on Dostoyevsky as he wrote the story of his Christ-like hero.

"One of the most excoriating, compelling and remarkable books ever written: and without question one of the greatest' A. C. GRAYLING