One of the great historical novels of the twentieth century, Memoirs of Hadrian is written as a long letter from the ageing Roman emperor Hadrian to his adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius.

Marguerite Yourcenar imagines the interior life of a ruler looking back over a lifetime of ambition, love, philosophy, administration and approaching death. The result is less a novel about the Roman Empire than about consciousness itself: what it means to govern, to desire, to age and to understand one's life only as it begins to end.

Originally published in French in 1951 after decades of research and revision, the novel established Yourcenar as one of Europe's most formidable literary stylists and later contributed to her becoming the first woman elected to the Académie Française. Her prose carries an extraordinary sense of historical intimacy without ever feeling antiquarian, moving effortlessly between politics, aesthetics, religion and private grief. The relationship between Hadrian and Antinous gives the novel much of its emotional gravity, while its reflections on power and civilisation remain startlingly contemporary. A landmark of historical fiction that comfortably belongs alongside the philosophical novels of Mann, Broch and Yourcenar's fellow European modernists.

1982 Penguin King Penguin paperback. Light shelf wear and age toning, with a clean, tightly bound interior.