About this audiobook
The lives of several Russian families become entangled with the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars. Private hopes, changing relationships and the search for a meaningful life unfold alongside military campaigns and shifts in the social world. Leo Tolstoy moves between drawing rooms, households and battlefields, showing how events acquire different meanings for the people who experience them.
The novel follows characters whose ideas about love, duty and their own importance are repeatedly tested. Decisions made with confidence can produce unexpected consequences, while moments that seem insignificant may change a life. Personal experience and the larger movement of history continually unsettle one another.
Alongside its family stories, the work questions how history is explained and how much control individuals possess over events. It explores responsibility, uncertainty and the difficulty of understanding other people, offering a varied account of human life in which public catastrophe and ordinary attachments remain closely connected.
