Cleopatra's palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order, a generation before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff's is a luminous reconstruction of a dazzling life.

About the Author

Stacey Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and The Times Literary Supplement and she has also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2000 Schiff won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Vera Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Saint-Exupery: A Biography about Antoine de Saint Exupery. In 2006 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City and Edmonton, Alberta.

Prizes

The massive US bestseller - 350,000 hardbacks sold in 22 weeks on New York Times List

Reviews

From its opening strains of music, this audiobook of Schiff's stellar biography of the Egyptian queen rewards the intellect and the senses. As Schiff dusts away history's spider webs, romance's distortions, and sexism's corruptions to reveal the true (or at least the truest possible) portrait of Cleopatra, Robin Miles's voice is deep, confiding, the perfect instrument to introduce a history that has been variously forgotten, misunderstood, or suppressed. Her enunciation is crisp, her pacing pure charm: she wrings every sentence for meaning, irony, and wit, taking us through pages of description or analysis with a stately pace. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"A swift, sympathetic life of one of history's most maligned and legendary women."-- Kirkus