For every crime, there must be a punishment Rassouls 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 Sophia, for whom he would do anything. So when he finds himself committing a murder, axe in hand, as if re-enacting the opening of Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment, his identification with the novels anti-hero is complete: Rassoul is Raskolnikov, transplanted to late twentieth-century Kabul. Amid the war-torn streets, Rassoul searches for the meaning of his crime. Instead he is pulled into a feverish plot thick with murder, guilt, morality and Sharia law, where the lines between fact and fiction, dream and reality, become dangerously blurred. Blackly comic, with flashes of poetry as well as brilliant irony, Atiq Rahimi's latest novel is an ingenious recasting of Dostoevskys masterpiece and a transgressive satire with a frightening resonance all its own.