Messalina

She has been an adjective for two thousand years. This is her account.

In the court of the Emperor Claudius, Valeria Messalina holds no title. She does not need one. She runs the most powerful household in the ancient world through a system of cultivated jealousies, strategic silence, and the precise deployment of legal machinery - arranging prosecutions, managing the Senate's fear, outmanoeuvring the freedmen who watch her with patient professional attention - governing Rome with intelligence and without credit, in the one hour before dawn each morning when no one is yet watching and the day has not yet demanded anything of her.

She is twenty-eight years old. She will not live to twenty-nine.

Messalina: Before the Verdict is told entirely in her own voice: posthumous, clear-eyed, and unwilling to offer the consolations the tradition expects. She does not ask for innocence. She admits what she did.

What the novel contests is not the record of her actions. It is the word the historians chose to explain them. Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal, Cassius Dio: every source that condemned her wrote under regimes that benefited from her condemnation.

Written in the tradition of Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. For readers of Circe, Hamnet, and Memoirs of Hadrian.