How a true believer in the revolution is brought to confess to crimes he did not commit. Koestler's 1940 novel about Stalinist show trials stages a great philosophical confrontation: the logic of the party versus the last gasp of individual conscience. Rubashov's interrogation scenes rank among the finest dialogue in 20th-century fiction. Modern Library placed it eighth.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.