Finding Napoleon

With its delightful adaptation of Napoleon Bonaparte's real attempt to write romantic fiction, Finding Napoleon: A Novel offers a fresh take on Europe's most powerful man after he's lost everything, except his last love. A forgotten woman of history—the audacious Countess Albine—helps narrate their tale of intrigue, passion, and betrayal during Napoleon's final exile. After the defeated Emperor Napoleon is sentenced to exile on tiny St. Helena Island in the remote South Atlantic, he and his lover, Albine de Montholon, plot to escape and rescue his young son. Banding together African slaves, British sympathizers, a Jewish merchant, a Corsican rogue, and French followers, they confront British opposition—as well as treachery within their own ranks—with sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, but always desperate action. Interspersed within the exile story, Napoleon finishes his real novel Clisson that he started writing as a young man. Now it's a father's message to the young son whom his enemies took from him, but how can they get it to the boy? When Napoleon and Albine break faith with one another, ambition and Albine's husband threaten their reconciliation. To succeed, Napoleon must learn whom to trust. To survive, Albine must decide whom to betray. Two hundred years after Napoleon's death, this elegant, richly researched historical novel reveals the Napoleon history conceals and the Countess Albine history has forgotten.