Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
Boris Pasternak follows a poet and physician through the upheaval of the Russian Revolution. Zhivago's effort to find shelter for his family brings private life into repeated collision with historical change.
Read it for the different measures of time that history and intimacy impose. The novel asks what happens to love, vocation and personal judgment when public events claim authority over every part of a life.
Featured edition: Everyman's Library hardcover, ISBN 9780679407591, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, with an introduction by John Bayley. The purchase link below is for this hardcover edition.