Splendor Before the Storm
Margaret George
The Splendor Before the Dark: A Novel of the Emperor Nero
(Berkley, 2018)
With a beautiful and clever wife but no heirs, ancient Rome’s most powerful emperor, Nero Augustus, is obsessed with cultivating art and culture. A decade into his rule, Rome goes up in flames. Some citizens and politicians suspect that Nero had something to do with it, but he shows he is determined to rebuild, and in a glorious way. With this enormous and rich undertaking, he runs into unrest and obstacles that include spies and two-faced, so-called allies in the Roman court. This book, entertaining as well as educational, is the sequel to the author’s Confessions of Young Nero.
8:30 AM | Rollins Community Center & Lewes History Museum
Margaret George, who is based in Madison, Wisconsin, after decades of international living, has written six historical, biographical novels that have been New York Times best-sellers, including The Memoirs of Cleopatra, which became an Emmy-nominated miniseries.