He was a romantic and a realist, a lover of strong women and beautiful men. And though he was at one time the richest, most powerful man in the world, his most prized possession was a book -- Homer's The Iliad, annotated by his tutor, Aristotle. Most of all, he was as much a myth as a man and a mystery ... even to himself. When Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 B.C. a month shy of his 33rd birthday and after conquering and reordering Persia, he left a sprawling empire and a burning question: What drove him? Before Alexander, culture flowed East to West. After, it would flow West to East, and we are the heirs of the continuing tension between the two. In this historical novel, Alexander encounters the only two enemies he cannot defeat: death and time. Surrendering to both, he considers a life that attempted to bridge seemingly irreconcilable opposites -- East and West, Persians and Greeks, a brutal father and a ruthless mother, a wily wife and a male soulmate. And above all, a tempered mind and ungovernable passions.