War and Peace

A beloved classic of world literature, War and Peace centers Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and studies the years around it through the lens of multiple wealthy families.
This book is an immediate and detailed rendering of life in Russia during the ruthless Napoleonic wars—from aristocratic soirees to duels over honor, mundanities of daily existence to brutalities of going into battle. Tolstoy’s stories of the interlocking families grant readers a true panorama of the political and social realities of the time. Tolstoy also defied previous conventions, interspersing his novel’s fictional story with philosophical chapters about conflict, history, and power. In doing so, he made it a hard book to classify, both then and now. But for all its genre refusal, it is frequently considered to be the best novel ever written.