My Book of the Century

The suffering of two sensitive souls—Yuri and Laura—during the cold, the hunger and the cruelty of the post-Revolution decade has never been expressed better, not even by Nadia Mandelstam in her book Hope Against Hope. And the quality of writing is exceptional. Pick up any sentence at random, and you find it insightful. One can only repeat Edmund Wilson: "Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history."