Abrams: 1969 books

Rome is in peril and the old order is changing. Centurion Aurelius Castus has been summoned back from his post in Britain to find himself caught up in a treacherous conspiracy threatening to bring down Emperor Constantine.Rewarded for saving the emperor's life in battle, Castus is promoted to the...

Once a soldier in an elite legion from the Danube, newly promoted centurion Aurelius Castus now finds himself stuck in Britain’s provincial backwater. But when the king of the Picts, the savages beyond Hadrian’s Wall, dies under mysterious circumstances, Castus is selected to command the bodyguard...

Susan Hill—the Man Booker Prize nominee and winner of the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham, and John Llewellyn Rhys awards—returns with a hair-raising new novel, the ninth book in one of the most acclaimed mystery series of our time. Featuring the enigmatic and brooding chief police inspector Simon...

Blending heart-pounding action and historical accuracy, Harry Sidebottom’s bestselling Warrior of Rome series took readers from the shouts of the battlefield to the whisperings of the emperor’s inner circle. Now, Sidebottom sets his sights on one of the bloodiest periods of Roman history—the...

A continuation of the saga of the von Trotta family from The Radetzky March, it is both a powerful and moving look at a decaying society and its journey through the War and its devastating aftermath, and the story of the erosion of one man's desperate faith in the virtues of a simple life.

By the time she is reunited with her husband, she is a very different woman. Years later, Nerys’s granddaughter Mair Ellis clears out her dead father’s house and finds an exquisite shawl. Wrapped in its folds is a lock of a child’s curly hair. With nothing else to go on, Mair decides to trace...

A messenger on the streets of Rome has been intercepted and tortured, revealing a plot to sabotage the Roman army's campaign against Caratacus, commander of Britannia's native tribes. A treacherous agent's mission is to open a second front of attack against them and eliminate the two Roman soldiers...

In this exquisitely dark debut, Kate Howard delivers a stirring tale on the cost of beauty, packed with suspense and period detail worthy of Kate Mosse, Jessie Burton, and Tracy Chevalier.Cursed from birth by the bird-shaped blemish across her face, Flavia spends much of her life hidden from the outside...

“[A] remarkably prescient novella prefiguring the collapse of morality and the rise of Nazism” by the celebrated Austrian author of The Emperor’s Tomb (Publishers Weekly).   With tragic foresight, Right and Left, first published in 1929, evokes the nightlife, corruption, political unrest, and...

The shame of the vanquished beats down mercilessly, as the frail old emperor prostrates himself before Shapur, King of Kings. Ballista looks on helplessly, but vows under his breath to avenge those who have brought the empire to the brink of destruction with their treachery. But first, he must decide...

In AD 264, the Roman Empire has been torn in two. The western provinces—Gaul, Spain and Britain—have been seized by Postumus, the pretender to the throne. To the east, on the plains of northern Italy, the armies of the emperor Gallienus muster and he is keen to take his rightful place of power....

It is April 238 AD, and the empire is in turmoil. With both Gordian the Elder and Younger dead in North Africa, tyrant and former emperor Maximinus Thrax seeks to reclaim the throne. The Senate, who supported the Gordian revolt, choose two of their own to claim power. But fighting erupts in the streets...

“A searing, thrilling, intelligent and often blackly funny book . . . [by] the finest American writer of espionage fiction” (John Connolly, #1 internationally-bestselling author of Woman in the Woods).   Under the leadership of a visionary woman president of the United States, the global community...

In AD 263, the Roman Empire is close to turmoil, violent uprising threatening to shatter the fragile balance of power. In the north, the tribes are increasingly bold in their raids on the Imperium. Ballista must undertake his most treacherous journey yet. He must face the Heruli -- the Eaters of Flesh,...