Dawn Empress: A Novel of Imperial Rome

by Faith L. Justice

Overview

A calculating court. An empire at risk. With her child brother the new emperor, will her family survive his reign?

Constantinople, AD 408. Princess Pulcheria is terrified for the future. With her father’s death leaving her seven-year-old brother as the new ruler, the astute girl fears the easily influenced boy will be destroyed by the whims of a manipulative aristocracy. Vowing to protect their family legacy, the young noble convinces the underage monarch to appoint her as the imperial regent.

Defending herself from duplicitous suitors, Pulcheria and her sisters escape marriage with a shocking vow, garnering favor with the people of Constantinople. But after her sibling comes of age, his ambitious wife and foolish support of heretics threaten to undo her plans to secure the empire’s sovereign authority.

Can this shrewd young princess outmaneuver a palace filled with greedy, power-hungry men?

Dawn Empress is the vivid second tale in the Theodosian Women biographical historical fiction series. If you like women who defined history, political scheming, and epic conflicts between family, church, and power, then you’ll love Faith L. Justice’s mesmerizing dive into Byzantine imperial life.

Buy Dawn Empress to fight for the throne today!

Product Details

BN ID:	2940164066857
Publisher:	Faith L. Justice
Publication date:	05/24/2020
Series:	Theodosian Women
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	924,281
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Faith L. Justice writes in her historic land marked home “The Suffragette House” in Brooklyn, New York where she lives with her family and the required gaggle of cats. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in such publications as Circles in the Hair, The Copperfield Review, and Beyond Science Fiction and Fantasy. She’s published articles in such venues as Salon.com, Writer's Digest, and The Writer. Faith is Chair of the Historical Novel Society--New York City chapter and Associate Editor for Space and Time Magazine. She co-founded a writer’s workshop many more years ago than she likes to admit. For fun, she digs in the dirt – her garden and various archaeological sites.

Editorial Reviews

2020-07-03
In this historical novel set in fifth-century Constantinople, a young princess struggles to defend the Eastern Roman Empire after her father’s death.

When the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Flavius Arcadius Augustus, suddenly dies at the age of 31, a dire crisis of succession presents itself. He left behind three daughters and only one son, Theodosius, who is only 7 years old. The predicament is a perilous one—the Western Empire is under siege by enemies, and “dour-faced” Arcadius’ rule was generally regarded as “disastrous.” In addition, there are persistent rumors that Theodosius is an illegitimate heir to the throne—his mother, Eudoxia, now dead, wasn’t known for her virtue. Pulcheria, Theodosius’ 9-year-old sister, though, is as remarkably precocious as she is protective of her little brother and is anxious to secure both the Eastern Empire and her family’s rule over it. As a girl, she’s barred from ever ruling herself, but she establishes herself as her brother’s closest adviser, asserting an indirect power by way of her influence over him. Anthemius, the second most powerful figure in the Eastern Empire, is appointed regent until Theodosius reaches the age of majority and plans to achieve his own foothold by marrying his rash grandson, Isidorus, to Pulcheria. In this sequel to Twilight Empress (2017), Justice chronicles, with a skillful blend of historical rigor and dramatic action, the extraordinary efforts of Pulcheria to outmaneuver her adversaries and defend Theodosius. The prose is razor sharp, and the tale is as impressively unsentimental as it is genuinely moving: “The one history lesson she learned over and over again was that the emperor was always in danger. That knowledge was a curse. As she had after her mother’s death, Pulcheria struggled with a sense of helplessness. She was a young girl with an impossible task.”

A gripping tale of a royal sister’s fraught political machinations.

Kirkus Reviews