The Sun of God - Hardcover

by Zoë Tavares Bennett (Author)

Julius Caesar is dead. The Republic has fallen. Rivals vie for power. Who will emerge the victor? And who will die trying?

When Julius Caesar is stabbed to death in Rome, 19-year-old Gaius Octavius is on the other side of the Adriatic Sea. Despite his youth and illness-riddled past, Octavius dreams of glory, and Caesar's death might just be the answer. Determined to write his own fate, Octavius sails to Rome with his close friend, Marcus Agrippa, who has followed the rich, charming, and ambitious Octavius since they were young.

Meanwhile in Rome, Marcus Antonius has seized power, though his heart longs for his mistress, Cleopatra, who has fled back to Egypt. As Octavius goes head to head with Antonius, his friendship with Agrippa slips into something tantalizing and forbidden, threatening all that they know. Amidst the plotting and deceit of Rome's elite, Octavius and Agrippa realize that power always demands a price, and that love more than hate is the most dangerous power of all.

Woven with history and forbidden romance, The Sun of God unveils the hidden world of Ancient Rome in the reimagined past of a young, ruthless Octavius as he defies all odds and rises to absolute power as Emperor Augustus, founding the Roman Empire and changing history forever.

A "gripping work of historical fiction," says the US Review of Books. "As the novel unfolds, readers become even more immersed in the treachery, brutality, and deception that formed some of Ancient Rome's most unforgettable-and most scandalous-stories."