In this deliciously sardonic fable, Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from imprisonment on the isle of St. Helena, where a petty officer will impersonate him. The exiled emperor becomes a cabin hand on a crayfish schooner, returns to the Continent under an alias, takes a tourist excursion to the battlefield of Waterloo and eventually makes his way to Paris, where loyal Bonapartists are mourning the death of their hero. Leys writes an elegant, precise prose that ironically evokes the Napoleonic age.
Teasing, imaginative and superbly entertaining, The Death of Napoleon is a modern classic. It won the prestigious Christina Stead Prize for fiction, The Independent (UK) Foreign Fiction Award and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Literary Translation. This award- winning novel was also recently made into a motion picture starring Ian Holm and this beautiful edition of The Death of Napoleon includes a new afterword by the author.
'His exquisite tale, a gem of a book, can be read as a parable on the folly of hero-worship, the perils of self-justifying notions of destiny and the vanity of all human striving.'—Publisher's Weekly
'An elegant and engaging piece of alternate history, gently tragic and wryly comic.'—D. J. Enright, Times Literary Supplement
Simon Leys' many books include The Hall of Uselessness, Chinese Shadows, The Death of Napoleon and Other People's Thoughts. He was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Le Monde and Le Figaro Littéraire.