*Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize*
"In this staggeringly good biography, Edmund Richardson reveals in riveting and sumptuous detail the real Alexander, the man behind the legend. Richardson has drawn on new sources from recent archeological discoveries, adding a real freshness to this millennia old story." —Daily Mail
An enthralling new biography of Alexander the Great, written as an intimate, present portrait of the way his world saw him and the price he paid to become history’s greatest military mind.
Alexander the Great: a wide-eyed boy from the hills of Macedon who ruled most of the known world by his mid-twenties. For centuries, historians, refugees, poets, and explorers have told his story, and yet Alexander himself has remained a mystery.
But over the last few years, a series of remarkable discoveries has changed everything. From the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and the dust of Central Asian hillsides, the remains of Alexander’s cities have emerged. The diaries of Babylonian astronomers who knew him have been deciphered. The tombs of his ancestors have been unearthed. Now, for the first time since antiquity, it is possible to tell a different story. The story of a young man whom almost no-one noticed, until the day he became king. A king who became a hero, a hero who became a living god, and a god who died broken-hearted in Babylon.
Using cutting-edge research and a unique narrative approach, Alexander thrusts readers into Alexander the Great’s world in ways which have never before been possible: to see the same stars wheeling overhead, feel the desert wind, and experience the full horror of battle. Alexander is a cinematic work of non-fiction, a revelatory retelling of one of the most famous and elusive stories in history.
