Empire's End: A Roman Story

"Empire’s End: A Roman Story by Leila Rasheed Yes, I thought the blending of fictional and real characters was cleverly done and I’d recommend this book to any child who wants to learn about ancient Rome but at the same time just enjoy a really engaging, sensitively written story. It’s very well researched and deals with themes of migration, female adolescence and growing up between worlds. The Voices series seeks to highlight the lesser known, unsung stories of our past and Rasheed’s novel is a valuable corrective to the idea that the Roman empire wasn’t a cultural melting pot, which it definitely was, particularly in the era in which the story is set, when the Roman Emperor himself – Septimius Severus – came from Africa and his wife from Syria. I only read it recently, having seen it recommended on social media, but will be passing it on to as many of the children I teach as I can. The main character is a well-born girl called Camilla, born to an African mother and Roman father, who has grown up in affluent circumstances in the city of Leptis Magna, in a Roman province of north Africa. Camilla is excited when her father – a physician and friend of the Emperor – is summoned back to Rome, which she will be seeing for the first time. But being part of the Emperor’s entourage is much more unsettling than she thought it would be and she soon finds herself undergoing a traumatic and frightening journey to Britain, a cold, unfamiliar place she must now call home. Camilla is the narrator of her own story but there is indeed a clever little chapter at the end, not in her own voice, where a young girl in the 21st century unearths something that once belonged to her. I won’t say what the object in question is, but suffice to say that its discovery acts on the young girl in something like the way reading Empire’s End: A Roman Story does on us. It reminds us of the stories hidden in the earth, waiting to be found by the young archaeologists and historians of the future, who will then hopefully be inspired to re-write and re-imagine the past anew."