Extract

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.

Five aristocratic families are drawn into the catastrophe of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and through their entangled loves, rivalries, and bereavements an entire civilization reveals itself. Tolstoy spent six years constructing this immense novel, populating it with over five hundred characters, and his ambition was nothing less than to render the full texture of life as it is actually lived: the way a young woman's first ball feels, the way smoke drifts across a battlefield, the way faith arrives uninvited in a moment of despair. Published between 1865 and 1869, it refuses every convention that would reduce experience to plot. History here is not the work of great men but the accumulation of countless small decisions.