Best Books About Napoleon Novels & Stories

And something sharper—printer ink, fresh and smug, like someone had typed a fresh lie and left it cooling on the desk. The walls were lined with smart looking books Gianni definitely never read. Mostly war memoirs, the kind where men who never bled write about the ones who did. I trailed my fingers along the spines—three volumes on Napoleon, untouched. A fourth, thinner, tucked slightly out of order. I pulled it. Nothing. No secret passage, no trapdoor, just more arrogance in hardcover. The desk was military neat. The kind of neat that tells you someone cleaned up after bleeding out. A silver ashtray still wore the ghost of a fresh burn—long and tapered, Gianni’s custom cigars.

I browsed the shelves, and I read the titles. Into the fire, A firsthand Account of the extraordinary Battle in Afghan War by Dakota Meyer, Bing West 500 Days, Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars- Kurt Eichenwald The War for crown and Empire There are all sorts of books about wars here. I paused in front of a book that I deemed the most interesting. I pulled it out of the shelf and stared at it, contemplating whether to get on with it or not. I can choose a much thinner book… The 33 Strategies of War- Robert Greene

The way silence with him is never empty. He tells me, at some point, about the summer he is twelve and reads every book on the third shelf left to right in order without looking at titles first, just to see what happens. “What happens,” I say. “I read three biographies of Napoleon, a book about beekeeping, two novels in French that I cannot understand, and a very long history of the British canal system,” he says. “In that order.” I stare at him. “How was the canal system.” “Surprisingly interesting,” he says. “Genuinely. I still think about the canal system sometimes. At inappropriate moments.”