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About Memoirs of Hadrian

For the first time in audio, Marguerite Yourcenar's masterpiece—an extraordinary novel based on the life of the Roman emperor Hadrian. "[James] Lailey sweeps us away with a virtuoso reading of this debate on soul, body, and power, sensitively underlining the nuanced sentiments in the passionate quest for essence and human value. The illusion of authenticity evoked by the reading is spellbinding..." — Booklist Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, this work is as extraordinary for its psychological depth as for its accurate reconstruction of the second century of our era. The author describes the book as a meditation upon history, but this meditation is built upon intensive study of the personal and political life of a great and complex character as seen by himself and his contemporaries, both friends and enemies. In a prose as firm as that of the great Latin stylists of his time, Marguerite Yourcenar reconstructs Hadrian's arduous early years, his triumphs and reversals, and his gradual reordering of a war-torn world with an imaginative insight that only a great novelist could provide. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux