Cleopatra's palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.

Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order, a generation before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff's is a luminous reconstruction of a dazzling life.

Stacey Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. Her essays and articles have appeared inThe New Yorker,The New York Times Book ReviewandThe Times Literary Supplementand she has also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2000 Schiff won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Vera Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize forSaint-Exupéry: A Biographyabout Antoine de Saint Exupéry. In 2006 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City and Edmonton, Alberta.

The massive bestselling life story of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt - 350,000 hardbacks sold in 22 weeks on New York Times List