Description

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Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called “elephantine fun” to write.

A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleon’s life into a pattern borrowed—in liberty, equality, and fraternity—from Beethoven’s Third “Eroica” Symphony, in this rich, exciting, bawdy, and funny novel Anthony Burgess has pulled out all the stops for a virtuoso performance that is literary, historical, and musical.

About the Author

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Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) is the author of many works, including The Wanting Seed, Nothing Like the Sun, and Re Joyce. A Clockwork Orange is one of the "100 best novels" of both Time magazine and Modern Library and is on David Bowie's Book List.

Praise For…

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A reader who delights in succulent phrase, the zest of word play and a saucy paragraph must fall on each new work of Anthony Burgess with ravenous appetite.…Burgess at his most characteristic, craziest.
— Washington Post

All of the Burgess embellishments are here, and they sing alluringly each to each.
— Sara Sanborn - New York Times

One of Burgess’s most important and experimental works.
— Andrew Biswell - Daily Telegraph

Alive, lush, lyric, human, witty and wildly comic.
— The Nation

Burgess sees Napoleon with a contemporary eye and all the hang-ups—hypochondria, image-massaging and, of course, Josephine. It’s a novel I’m sure I will return to again and again, finding new pleasures at each reading.
— Ion Trewin - Times (London)