'The most innovative and challenging writer of fiction in his generation in Russia' Guardian Based on a real-life crime which horrified Russia in 1869, Dostoevsky intended his novel to castigate the fanaticism of his country's new political reformers, particularly those known as Nihilists.Blackly funny, grotesque and shocking, Demons is a disturbing portrait of five young men saturated in ideology and bent on destruction, and a compelling study of terrorism. 'Marvellous...a fluid and well-paced translation' Observer