Balzac's Lives by Peter Brooks

A clear and engaging overview of Honoré de Balzac told not through his life, but through the imaginative vitality of his many characters, Peter Brooks crafts a literary study that reads with the intimacy of fiction, revealing the novelist’s inner concerns—obsessions with money, power, love, identity—by tracing nine vivid figures from La Comédie Humaine in richly contextualized mini-biographies. This “antibiography” brings the dynamism of 19th‑century France to light and invites readers to rediscover Balzac’s world in an original, immersive way