Publisher's Synopsis
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 Sophie. 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. Amid the war-torn streets, as Rassoul searches for the meaning of his crime, he is pulled into a feverish plot thick with murder, guilt, morality and Sharia law - where the line between dreams and reality becomes dangerously blurred...
