House of the Dead

In a nutshell, Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical novel based on his own time in a Siberian prison camp. Unlike his later, more philosophical works, this one is a brutally realistic look at life in a penal colony, told through the fictional narrator Alexander Goryanchikov, a nobleman convicted of murdering his wife.

It’s not a typical novel with a plot arc; it reads more like a series of vivid sketches and reflections on suffering, freedom, and the moral cost of punishment.