War and Peace

Tolstoy’s War and Peace masterfully demarcates between nuanced viewpoints in the history surrounding the Napoleonic Wars. Told through a historical fiction lens, Tolstoy manages to build a true-to-life world in which change (i.e., destruction and reconstitution) feels inevitable and in which no individual is unaffected. Weaving French and Russian culture into the tapestry of the story’s character arcs, War and Peace delivers a (truly dense) one-of-a-kind novel that encapsulates with stunning detail what it was like to live in both cultures at a time of great international conflict.