![]() ![]() ![]() This is the first of a trilogy and sets the bar high for the next two books Mr. As such, the reader gets a lesson in the true history of Rome while also enjoying the benefits of the imagined human interactions on the page. ![]() Covering some thousand years of the ebbs and flows of human existence, this is a sprawling novel, but one that manages to keep its focus by honing in on two specific (fictional) families who are at times friends and at other times rivals of each other and who are in various ways witnesses to the great events of the times. Steven Saylor’s Roma takes the same tack: here we follow the Potitius and Penarius clans from the beginnings of the geographic area of Italy that became Rome, a crossroads where goods were traded, through to the assassination of Julius Ceasar in 44 BC and its aftermath. One of my all-time favourite historical novels is Edward Rutherfurd’s Sarum, which follows several families through the generations that it took to build Salisbury Cathedral. ![]()
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