War and Peace

Five families, three battles and one invasion, held together by the argument that history is not made by great men at all. Tolstoy revised the book over and over, his wife copying the drafts by hand, and denied to the end that it was a novel. It contains the best-known account of the burning of Moscow and one of the few battle scenes in literature written by a man who had been shelled. Its 163 original illustrations have been carefully restored and coloured for this edition.