As the literary world enters a new year, it’s time for publishers to look back at the hits and misses of the year just passed. What, for example, do you expect was the UK’s bestselling Penguin Classic title of 2024? In most years, the correct answer would be a predictable one: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In 2024, however, one surprising title has leapfrogged all the others to become Penguin’s top-selling classic of the year: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1848 novella White Nights, which has shifted more than 50,000 copies since last January.
But this answer raises bigger questions. What is the appeal of a lesser-known early work from Russia’s trickiest master that has led it to outstrip hardy perennials such as F Scott Fitzgerald and Emily Brontë?