THE LION OF MACEDON: How Alexander Conquered the World

In 336 BC, a twenty-year-old prince watched his father murdered in a crowded theater — and within thirteen years had conquered the largest empire the ancient world had ever known. The Lion of Macedon: How Alexander Conquered the World tells the story of Alexander the Great as it actually happened: not as polished legend, but as history, with all the ambition, brilliance, and brutality intact.

Written in vivid, immersive prose and grounded in the accounts of Arrian, Plutarch, Diodorus, and Curtius, this book follows Alexander from the battlefields of Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela, through the seven-month siege of Tyre and the founding of Alexandria, into the deserts of Bactria and the banks of the Hydaspes. A portrait of one of history’s most consequential figures that is as clear-eyed about his costs as it is about his genius — and a meditation on what happens to an empire when winning simply never stops. For readers of Robin Lane Fox and Mary Renault.