Across the years of the Napoleonic Wars, Leo Tolstoy follows the intertwined fortunes of several Russian aristocratic families, chiefly the Bezukhovs, Bolkonskys, and Rostovs, as their lives are swept up in an era of invasion, upheaval, and change. At its center are three unforgettable figures: the awkward, searching Pierre Bezukhov, heir to an unexpected fortune; the disillusioned Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, seeking meaning in war and love; and the vivid, impulsive young Natasha Rostova.
Around their courtships, marriages, betrayals, and spiritual crises, Tolstoy stages the great public events of the age, from the salons of Saint Petersburg to the catastrophe of the 1812 French invasion and the burning of Moscow. He moves constantly between the intimate and the immense, insisting that history is made not by great men but by the countless small actions of ordinary people.
War and Peace is one of the towering achievements of world literature, part novel, part philosophy of history. Vast in scope yet minutely observed, it is a meditation on love, death, freedom, and the search for how to live.