The House of the Dead

Jun 30, 2025 11:05 PM

Author:Fyodor Dostoyevsky,David McDuff,David McDuff

In January 1850 Dostoyevsky was sent to a remote Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy. The four years he spent there, startlingly re-created in The House of the Dead, were the most agonizing of his life. In this fictionalized account he recounts his soul-destroying incarceration through the cool, detached tones of his narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov: the daily battle for survival, the wooden plank beds, the cabbage soup swimming with cockroaches, his strange ‘family’ of boastful, ugly, cruel convicts. Yet The House of the Dead is far more than a work of documentary realism: it is also a powerful novel of redemption, describing one man’s spiritual and moral death and the miracle of his gradual reawakening.

Reviews

'John Lennon once said that 'life is what happens while you're busy making other plans', a simple truth beautifully conveyed in this powerful novel'

—— Choice

A stonking read.

—— WOMAN'S OWN (5 STARS)

Three Junes almost threatens to burst with all the life it contains. Glass's ability-would be marvellous in any novelist. In a first-time novelist, it's extraordinary.

—— Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours.

This is the one novel that everyone insisted I took with me. Set in a Sudanese village by the Nile, it is a brilliant exploration of African encounters with the West, and the corrupting power of colonialism. I never got this book out to read without someone coming up to tell me how brilliant it was

—— Mary Beard

An Arabian Nights in reverse, enclosing a pithy moral about international misconceptions and delusions...Powerfully and poetically written and splendidly translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

—— Observer

The prose, translated from Arabic, has a grave beauty. It's the story of a man who returns to his native Sudan after being educated in England, then encounters the first Sudanese to get an English education. The near-formal elegance in the writing contrasts with the sly anti-colonial world view of the book, and this makes it even more interesting

—— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Denys Johnson-Davies...the leading Arabic-English translator of our time

—— Edward Said

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