Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels byPBS’s The Great American Read Oftencalled the greatest novel ever written,War and Peaceis at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit.At a glittering society party in St. Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon’s army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey, and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself. InWar and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand themes — conflict and love, birth and death, free will and fate — with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.Tolstoy’s genius is seen clearly in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle — all of them fully realized and equally memorable. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individual’s place in the historical process, one that makes it clear whyThomas Mannpraised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placedWar and Peacein the same category as the Iliad: “To read him... is to find one’s way home... to everything within us that is fundamental and sane.”“There remains the greatest of all novelists — for what else can we call the author ofWar and Peace?”—Virginia Woolf