Set in the city of Saint Petersburg, it deals with the life of the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his love affair with Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina who would later become his wife.

Dostoyevsky had promised his editor Stellovsky that he would complete the novel The Gambler within a few months, but he had not yet written a single page.

The novel delves deep into Dostoyevsky's mind and exposes his loneliness, weaknesses, pain, and spiritual agony.

He argues that only a saint could have produced such great works as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoyevsky's epileptic seizures, gambling mania, and alcoholism are not considered mere weaknesses of his heart, but symbols of creative agony and internal conflicts of a great writer.

[9][10] It was adapted into a 2016 Indian film, titled In Return: Just a Book, by Shiny Benjamin with a screenplay by Paul Zacharia.