The Last Station

"A skillful tapestry. . . . The Last Station illumines the larger than fiction life of a literary giant." --USA Today "Utterly satisfying. . . . A loving and thoughtful rendering of the complex character of Leo Tolstoy. . . . Parini captures marvelously the paradoxical nature of this genius whose mind and body seemed ever to be at war." --Washington Post Book World

"Fascinating. . . . Parini has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Tolstoy." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A subtle masterpiece. . . . Tolstoy himself would probably have recognized the work of a true artist." --The Times Literary Supplement

"One of those rare works of fiction that manages to demonstrate both scrupulous historical research and true originality of voice and perception. . . . What lifts this book high above most historical novels is Jay Parini's remarkable ability to enter the minds of his characters." --The New York Times Book Review

"A powerful story. . . . Witty [and] immensely moving. . . . Parini draws the reader into the tumult of the Tolstoy household." --Christian Science Monitor

"One of the best historical novels written in the last twenty years." --Gore Vidal

"Vivid and moving. . . . It is to Jay Parini's credit that he has been able to flesh out the saga and make it ever new, to give it a shape and resonance we might have thought unimaginable." --Newsday

"This wonderful book combines scholarship and sensitive re-creation of a man's struggle to be true to himself and to others." --Dallas Morning News

"The Last Station offers proof that the historical novel has a lot left to say to and about literature. And any novel with as perfectly beautiful a final sentence as this one deserves to be read all the way through." --Philadelphia Inquirer

"Poets who write novels are a strange and wonderful breed, in love with language as well as character. In The Last Station, Jay Parini has tackled an awesomely ambitious novel and succeeded brilliantly." --Erica Jong

"Tolstoy imagined--and illuminated." --Boston Globe

"[A] coup of period re-creation. . . . [Parini] is very good at showing how an artist or visionary can be at once idealistic, mundane and incompetently avaricious." --Chicago Tribune

"Jay Parini has written a stylish, beautifully paced and utterly beguiling novel." --The Sunday Times (London)

"Entertaining. . . . A three-dimensional portrait of a complex literary figure. . . . Biographers have described the events of Tolstoy's life in great detail, but none so insightfully and eloquently as Jay Parini in The Last Station." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"A gem of a historical novel. . . . A novel with a lyric tone that manages to extract excitement from an unlikely subject." --Newark Star-Ledger

"A searching view of the last year in the life of the author of War and Peace. . . . A kaleidoscopically rich and skillful novel." --Publishers Weekly

"An impressively knowing and sensitive performance, a wistful late twentieth-century tribute to the giant conflicts of a more titanic age." --The Observer (London)