There is a list buzzing about on the internet somewhere of the ten books people claim to have read but actually haven’t – Orwell makes an appearance on it, as does Charles Dickens, but there’s only one writer who receives the hollow victory of having two novels in the top ten. Tolstoy‘s War and Peace and Anna Karenina are the third and forth most likely novels that people lie about having read. Now, I won’t lie, I haven’t read them either – my knowledge of Russian writing has extended until now, only to Chekhov, so I was very excited to get down to the Jack Studio Theatre in Brockley to see Arrows & Traps Theatre Company tackle Helen Edmundson‘s stage adaptation of Anna Karenina – what turned out to be – a Russian masterpiece of forbidden love and sacrifice.