Description: Against the historical backdrop of the French expedition in 1840 to retrieve Napoleon's body from Saint Helena, two men and a woman find themselves engulfed in long-dormant and dangerous political passions.
Brief description: Peter Brooks has written extensively about the nineteenth-century novel, French and English. His books include The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess; Reading for the Plot, Body Work, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling and The Emperor's Body: A Novel. After many years on the faculty at Yale University, he currently teaches at Princeton University.