250 pages
English language
Published Nov. 14, 2013 by Chatto & Windus.
Rassoul's world consists of little more than a squalid rented room - strewn with books by Dostoevsky, relics from his days as a student of Russian Literature at Leningrad - and his beloved fiancee Sophia, for whom he would do anything. So when he finds himself committing a murder, axe in hand, as if re-enacting the opening of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, his identification with the novel's anti-hero is complete: Rassoul is Raskolnikov, transplanted to late twentieth-century Kabul.
"You can kill, rape, steal .... the important thing is not to betray. Not to betray Allah, your clan, your country, your friend. "
In war-torn Kabul, a Dostoevsky reader finds himself in Raskolnikov position and suffers similar torments.
