The Confessions of a Young Nero - Spotlight

Preeminent historical fiction novelist and acclaimed chronicler of kings and queens MARGARET GEORGE casts her eye to ancient Rome. Her new book, THE CONFESSIONS OF YOUNG NERO offers a luminescent look at the boy charged with leading the Roman Empire at age sixteen: “bad boy” emperor Nero.

THE CONFESSIONS OF YOUNG NERO

by Margaret George

Berkley Hardcover

On Sale: March 7, 2016

Price: $28.00

ISBN: 9780451473387

 

Behind each Roman Emperor’s climb to power lie the grand ambitions and chilling machinations of those closest to him. And none match the spectacularly theatrical and fraught sequences that carried teenage Nero to the throne. He is enshrined in popular memory as a hedonist, a tyrant, and cunning executioner. But how much is legend, and how much fact?  Who is the real Nero, and how did he get to be this way?

When he is just a small child, Nero’s mother, Agrippina, is released from exile by her elderly uncle—the newly crowned Emperor Claudius. Agrippina quickly plucks Nero from his modest upbringing, and embarks on a ruthless pruning of the family tree to ensure what she believes is her son’s rightful place in the Palace. Her naked ambition, cunning, and well-placed doses of poison help the obstacles fall one by one, until a teenage boy is given control of an Empire. Both tempted and terrified to assume his reign, Nero’s indoctrination into the incest, violence, luxury, and intrigue that have gripped Rome’s seat of power for generations will shape him into the man he was fated to become.