Childhood, boyhood, youth. Leo Tolstoy. 2012.

Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, in his early twenties. Although he would, in his old age, famously dismiss it as an "awkward mixture of fact and fiction', generations of readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world described with extra ordinary clarity, grace and colour. Evident too in its brilliant account of a young person's emerging awareness of the world and of his place within it are many of the stances, techniques and themes that would come to full flower in the immortal War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and in the other great works of Tolstoy's maturity.

Judson Rosengrant's lucid new translation conveys the freshness, poetry and power of Tolstoy's early prose, while his introduction looks at Tolstoy's early development and the complex relationship between the trilogy and his life. This edition also contains a biographical chrono-logy, suggestions for further reading, extensive historical notes and a list of characters.