Napoleon Bonaparte understood the strategic importance of telling his own story; his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century. Yet his thirty-three thousand letters were published only recently, and Andrew Roberts's new biography, Napoleon: A Life, is the first to take advantage of them, revealing Napoleon’s layers of complexity and uncovering parts of his character and motivation that were previously misunderstood. 

Napoleon: A Life

(Courtesy of the publisher)