Romanitas: Volume 1 (Romanitas Trilogy 1) [Paperback]

Sophia will be giving a talk at THE SOUTH FESTIVAL, part of the BRIGHTON ARTS FESTIVAL, on 17th May.

This is a fine first-time novel that expands the alternate history genre.

A transfixing first novel in an epic trilogy... A stunningly imaginative tale.

…For anyone who has grown up on Philip Pullman and doesn’t know where to go for an exciting tale.

Imagine the Roman Empire is still flourishing today... The first novel in a breathtaking trilogy

'The plot of Romanitas had me gripped and kept the pages turning. ...original... well researched and believable' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'McDougall's writing style is fresh and light and the involving story ensures you'll gobble up the 400 pages in no time, staying eager to find out how the remainder of the trilogy unfolds.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'[a] hugely imaginative debut' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Romanitas, the first of a three-parter... sets the stage for an absorbing drama' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'McDougall's writing style is fresh and light and the involving story ensures you'll gobble up the 400 pages in no time, staying eager to find out how the remainder of the trilogy unfolds.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In 2756 AC (2003 AD in Christian terms), magnetic railways span Roman territory from Persia to Terranova, and mechanised crucifixes are ranked along the banks of the Thames. As volume one of ROMANITAS opens, Marcus Novius Faustus Leo, heir apparent to the Imperial throne, is mourning the death of his parents following a tragic accident. However, as information about the last days of his father's life becomes known to him, Marcus realises that his father's death was no accident and that his own life is in danger. Meanwhile, an escaped slave girl called Una, who possesses the power to look inside others' minds, struggles to save her brother, Sulien, from a London prison ship. In a fortune teller's stall in a Gallic flea-market, Marcus, Una and Sulien's paths cross, and the fate of the Empire rests on their shoulders...

Sophia McDougall is twenty-four years old and studied English at Oxford. This is her first novel.

[From Chapter III]

Sulien had lived five days longer as a result of the deaths of Marcus’ parents, but the morning after their funeral the guards led him out of his cell in the prison ship on the Thames estuary, and put him on the low-slung army boat bound for London.

They would already know his height and the span of his arms; they would have adjusted the settings accordingly. They would fix his arms and legs in place with leather straps and tighten them until the backs of his wrists were flat on the metal and his feet pressed hard against each other. Then they would turn a switch on the side of the cross, and three spikes would leap upright as surely as three keys entering three locks, undoing the knots of veins, puncturing the thick nerve that carried the precious feeling in his fingers, splaying the bones of his feet, violating the darkness of the flesh and finding the light again beyond the soft, vulnerable skin. Then a hydraulic pump would slowly raise the steel cross up to face the river, tipping him gently forwards so that his weight was slung between his pierced wrists, tugging the bones of his arms from their sockets, trapping the breath in his lungs. He might hang there, fighting the cross for days; watching the barges going back and forth on the Thames, carrying coal and sugar and wine.

Sulien knew a lot about the body, and he could imagine intensely and accurately what was going to happen to him. He even thought that if he shut his eyes and concentrated on his own innocent nerves, he could imagine the pain. And yet he could not believe in it; it was impossible that sitting there, with all his flesh knowing it had decades ahead of it, he should really be dying more certainly than of any illness. His body was so convinced it could not happen that he was not even as afraid as he should be. He felt he could hardly move or think, and not really for fear but because he was so hypnotised by the certainty that this wasn’t true, that there was more before him than hours of torture and then nothing.

Every half hour one of the officers would open the little hatch in the door and look in to make sure he had not found the one escape from the steel cross, the way through the wall of his own muscle and skin. Every time this happened it reminded Sulien that he really ought to have a go at killing himself. But he could not believe in that either – it was just not the sort of thing he would ever do. He got up and turned in a pointless little half-circle – trying to work himself up to it, or trying to persuade the walls around him of the laughable implausibility of his being about to die. "Come on. Do it," he said sternly, aloud. He sat down again and looked speculatively at his wrists. At once he shuddered and clenched his right hand protectively around his left wrist, clutching so hard that his fingers could just feel the groove between the two thin bones. Gathering himself again he began to pull clumsily at the hem of his shirt, pretending that he would tear off a strip and!
twist it into a noose, knowing that he wouldn’t. He could not think what to fix it to in any case; but people did kill themselves, even on suicide watch, so it must be possible. It was just somehow not possible for him.

The hatch opened again – how could that have been half an hour? It had scarcely felt like time enough to cross the cell.