Tolstoy's last full length novel is ironic: at a time when he was most immersed in his religious modes of thought he is in many ways his most subtle – War and Peace, with its philosophical digressions this is not. It is, instead, the moving tale of an aristocrat whose guilt at being the member of a jury that convicts a woman, in effect for being poor, leads him to abandon his luxurious life to follow her into exile. At this stage in his life Tolstoy was grappling with his own religious revival, his growing links with and sympathies for the Old Believers, and would in a few years abandon his home and family to die in a provincial railway station master's house. Don't expect the sweeping narratives of Anna Karenina or War and Peace. This may be a full length novel but it is more like much of the short fiction in its tone. Rewarding.