Five aristocratic families during the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, and Tolstoy makes you care about every one of them while simultaneously questioning whether individuals matter to history at all. The novel is over a thousand pages; it contains balls and battles, births and deaths, Napoleon and peasants, everything. Tolstoy was in his thirties, already famous, and he wrote this while farming, raising children, questioning everything. The philosophy intrudes; some skip it. The characters live. Natasha at the window; Andrei under the sky at Austerlitz; Pierre in Moscow: these scenes are as real as memory. The cavalry charges. The snow falls. The peace comes, eventually.