This book focuses on farm owner Bathsheba and her three suitors and shows the many faces of love. Perhaps the luckiest outcome is for Gabriel Oak, a shepherd who ends up with the love that makes life joyful.

Passionate confessions from a tormented soul are the meat of this first of Dostoevsky's books. A minor official brutally scrutinizes himself and decides to go "underground," away from society. This is a strange account of a man relentless in his examination of the world and his own soul, but it is also occasionally comical.