1st Century
Mistress of Rome
Thea is a Jewish slave girl, brought to Rome to be maidservant to the spoiled beauty Lepida Pollia. Arius the…
Salome
Although the concept of a sympathetic backstory for the notorious Salomé—she whose dance ended in the beheading of John the…
Mistress of Rome
Fans of fiction set in ancient Rome are spoilt for choice when it comes to thud-and-blunder action for the boys.…
The Prophet from Ephesus
I was sad to learn, on doing the research for this review, that there is only one book in Lawrence’s…
Rome, The Emperor’s Spy
Editors' choice
This is a spy thriller which opens in Jerusalem in the reign of Tiberius where a young man, Math, watches…
The Silver Eagle
Editors' choice
The Silver Eagle, the second in a trilogy, picks up from where the earlier book, The Forgotten Legion, left off.…
Cleopatra’s Daughter
In 30 BC, after the defeat and suicide of Antony and Cleopatra, their twin children, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene,…
Girl Mary
Romanian-born bestseller Petru Popescu imagines the girlhood of Jesus’s mother in this European-flavored literary work. We first see the tall…
Claudius
Editors' choice
Emperor Claudius needs to secure his tenuous position in Rome and sets his sights on victory in Britain as a…
Gladiatrix
In the first century AD, a 19-year-old Spartan, Lysandra, is enslaved after being the sole survivor of a shipwreck. In…
About our Reviews
Over the last 15 years The Historical Novels Review (the society’s print magazine for our members) has published reviews of some 12,000 historical fiction books. We plan to upload them all and make them searchable here.
