The Emperor's Babe

Londinium, Britannia, A.D. 211. A city of slum tenements and sumptuous villas, of orgy queens, drag queens, and drama queens. A city where the currency is often sex, where children go to work at age five, and marriage is a career move. Through the bustling city we follow Zuleika, the feisty, precocious daughter of Sudanese immigrants-made-good. Married off at eleven to Felix, a rich Roman senator three times her age who is usually away on business, Zuleika drifts around his beautiful villa, bored, or sneaks out to see her old friends. Then one night at the theater, several years later, she is spotted by the visiting Roman emperor, Septimus Severus, and they begin a passionate affair. This is the unforgettable story of Zuleika, the Emperor's Babe, told through a dazzling fusion of poetry and fiction, history and myth. Funny, playful, and erotic, Bernardine Evaristo's novel in verse is a triumph of imaginative writing and a gorgeously readable and vivid narrative. Readable, sexy, delicious . . . I loved this book (Helen Dunmore, author of A Spell of Winter) Evaristo's triumph is to transmute politics and history into a glittering fiction whose words leap off the page into life. Anarchic, she calls it, but brilliant would do just as well. (The Times, London)