War and Peace by node

Three Russian aristocratic families are swept through the Napoleonic invasion of 1812: the restless Bolkonskys, the warm and chaotic Rostovs, the searching Pierre Bezukhov and his inherited fortune. Tolstoy tracks their marriages, quarrels, battlefield terrors, and drawing room comedies across fifteen years, building a portrait of a society that believed it controlled history and discovered it did not. The result is the most ambitious novel ever written about the distance between how people imagine their lives and how those lives actually unfold.