War and Peace in a Year

War and Peace is the novel everyone means to read and the one most often left on a summer holiday somewhere around page two hundred. It was never meant to be read in a fortnight. Tolstoy's chapters are short, most of them ten minutes or less, and there are three hundred and sixty-five of them, which is exactly a year. This is the whole novel in the Maudes' translation, one chapter a day from the first of January: the Petersburg drawing rooms, Austerlitz, Natasha's first ball, the comet of 1812, Borodino, Moscow burning and the long retreat, and at the very end Tolstoy's own argument about what moves history. By December the Rostovs will feel like people you have known for years.

Read one big book alongside other readers, a day at a time. Cohorts set off on the date above.