Possessed (Unabridged edition)

Also known as Demons, The Possessed is a powerful socio-political novel about revolutionary ideas and the radicals behind them.

It follows the career of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, a political terrorist who leads a group of Nihilists on a demonic quest for societal breakdown.

They are consumed by their desires and ideals, and have surrendered themselves fully to the darkness of their `demons'.

This possession leads them to engulf a quiet provincial town and subject it to a storm of violence. Inspired by a real political killing in 1869, the book is an impassioned response to the ideologies of European liberalism and nihilism, which threatened Russian Orthodoxy; it eerily predicted the Russian Revolution, which would take place fifty years later.

Funny, shocking and tragic, it is a profound and affecting work with deep philosophical discourses about God, human freedom and political revolution.