Why Napoleon? Read on to discover how this unlikely man—who’s both revered and reviled—defined an era. But you won’t learn much about battles here. I’m interested in Napoleon himself, in the people around him, and in the culture of his era. St. Helena Island in the remote South Atlantic, where Napoleon spent the last five years of his life in exile (and which I visited in 2011), is a particular fascination of mine.
My novel, FINDING NAPOLEON—with its adaptation of Napoleon Bonaparte’s real attempt to write a novel—offers a fresh take on Europe’s most powerful man after he’s lost everything. A forgotten woman of history, the audacious Albine de Montholon, narrates their tale of intrigue, love, and betrayal.
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As a writer, especially a fiction writer, I collect details and search for interesting, memorable ways to describe them. My quest to capture the essence of Napoleon requires recreating, first in my mind and then in my readers’ imaginations, a sense of his everyday life. For example, when he got out of bed, did his […]
The breadth of Napoleonic material amazes and at times overwhelms me. Of course, its volume results from the huge impact he had in so many physical, political and cultural areas of the world, but I am grateful to the multitude of scholars who have painstakingly recorded the details, both small and large. I’m not a
He is the epitome of France, yet he didn’t speak French until he was nine. The second son of minor, impoverished Corsican nobility, he attended military school on the French king’s sou. By age thirty, he had supplanted that monarch as France’s ruler. He faced battle fearlessly but could be petulant over a slight head
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