Versailles

This brilliantly acclaimed novel tells the story of an expansive spirit locked in a pretty body and an impossible moment in history. As Versailles begins, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé. He will become the sixteenth Louis to rule France, and Antoinette will be his queen-although neither shows a strong inclination toward power, politics, or the roles that they have been summoned to play. Antoinette finds herself hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, and the manifold twists and turns of the palace she calls home. Versailles is an enchanting meditation on time and the soul's true journey within it, at once wittily entertaining and astonishingly wise.