Leona Francombe

The most beguiling and distinctive debut novel of the season: the Battle of Waterloo…as told by a rabbit.

On June 17, 1815, the Duke of Wellington amassed his troops at Hougoumont, an ancient farmstead not far from Waterloo. The next day, the French attacked—the first shots of the Battle of Waterloo—sparking a brutal, day-long skirmish that left six thousand men either dead or wounded.

William is a white rabbit living at Hougoumont today. Under the tutelage of his mysterious and wise grandmother Old Lavender, William attunes himself to the echoes and ghosts of the battle, and through a series of adventures he comes to recognize how deeply what happened at Waterloo two hundred years before continues to reverberate. “Nature,” as Old Lavender says, “never truly recovers from human cataclysms.”

The Sage of Waterloo is a playful retelling of a key turning point in human history, full of vivid insights about Napoleon, Wellington, and the battle itself—and a slyly profound reflection on our place in the world.