In the Library
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy, 1869
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 41 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Aylmer Maude & Louise Maude
- Original
- Original ru
- Chapters
- Chapters 365
- Length
- Length 562k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read War and Peace
A book so famously enormous that its reputation hides the truth, which is that the thing itself reads faster, warmer, and more like an addictive family saga than almost anything its size has any right to.
The reputation of War and Peace is mostly about its size, the fifteen hundred pages and the sheer heft of the thing, and it tells you that reading it will be a long, dutiful slog through Russian history and Napoleonic troop movements that you will mostly admire yourself for surviving. The size is real and almost everything else about that reputation is wrong. What is actually waiting inside is one of the most companionable and fast-moving stories ever written, a sprawling family saga full of falling in love and falling out of it, money troubles and duels and first balls and deathbeds, told in prose so clear and unfussy that the pages turn far more quickly than their number ever lets you believe they will.
If you like this, try
The Iliad
Homer
Homer invented the war epic Tolstoy spent twelve hundred pages answering.
£1.99
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
Proust matches Tolstoy's scale but turns the lens inward, swapping battlefields for memory.
£1.99
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy focuses the same panoramic eye on a single woman, and the result is more devastating.
£1.99
About the book
Natasha Rostova stands at the edge of her first ball, sixteen and terrified no one will ask her to dance, and Tolstoy gives the moment the same grave attention he gives the cannon at Borodino, because to him they are the same size. That is the secret of War and Peace: a girl's held breath and an empire's invasion belong to one continuous fabric of being alive. Five families move through fifteen years of Napoleonic war, and the book follows them so closely that you stop reading about them and simply live beside them, year after year. Prince Andrei lies wounded under a sky so high and endless that everything he believed about glory falls silent. Pierre, rich and adrift, keeps mistaking the shape of meaning and stumbling toward it anyway. Tolstoy's argument, woven into the structure itself, is that no general wins a battle: history is the sum of millions of frightened private wills, all moving at once. You finish it changed, the way you finish a decade.