Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
kept by Mine in Five Favourite Novels
Don't want to put both this and War and Peace. I know these can seem intimidating given their length and the fact they are "serious" 19th century Russian stuff written by a man with a terrifying beard, but they are just so brilliant. Anna Karenina is more conventionally a novel, war and peace is a big monster sprawling all over the place. But I love both. The good news is Tolstoy tends to write in short chapters and is constantly moving between his different narrative threads, so they are very rarely hard reading. With war and peace you may have to commit to giving it one hundred pages or before it really sucks you in.