Excerpt from The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The massacre marks the end of the dynasty and our narrative but not the end of the story. Today's Russia throbs with the reverberations of its history. The very bones of the Romanovs are the subject of intense political and religious controversy while their imperial interests— from Ukraine to the Baltics, Caucasus to Crimea, Syria and Jerusalem to the Far East— continue to define Russia and the world as we know it. Blood-spattered, gold-plated, diamond-studded, swash-buckled, bodice- ripping and star-crossed, the rise and fall of the Romanovs remains as fascinating as it is relevant, as human as it is strategic, a chronicle of fathers and sons, megalomaniacs, monsters and saints.

Excerpted from The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Copyright © 2016 by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.