Today for #HistFicThursdays, I am delighted to once again be teaming up with The Coffee Pot Book Club , this time to share an excerpt from SP Somtow 's fantastic new book Nero and Sporus ! First of all, let's meet the book... Finally available in one volume! The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena. Nero and Sporus is available on #KindleUnlimited via this link . And here's an excerpt to whet your appetite: I suppose we were anxious to see who the surprise competitor would be, but no one was as surprise...
Review After the disaster which was my last read for this Challenge, I immediately realised that this book was perfect for laying that ghost to rest, which is topical because that is the theme of this entire story: Brigid Cleary is driven to avenge the brutal torture and murder of her mother, Bridget Cleary, who was a real-life victim of extreme domestic violence in 1895. A historical note at the beginning of the book shares the facts. Mathilda Zeller creates the world clearly and the characters are mostly very well developed. You find yourself longing for Brigid to find the peace that she's so desperate for; being thankful - or perhaps wishing - for friends like Florence and Adelaide, and falling in love with Edmund and willing him not to let you down. Perhaps the only character who convinced me less than entirely was Mr Baxby. I felt like the whole story could have been rewritten from his point of view and he would have been a sorry character. How lovely to be back with charact...