War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy Wordsworth Classics

War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy.
From the Back Cover:
Among the great novels of the world, 'War and Peace' has long held pride of place because it fulfills, in its seamless interweaving of the historical and the personal, and its genius in registering the entire scale of human life, all the promise latent in the art of fiction itself.