The Emperor's Babe by Bernardine Evaristo

Sexy, clever and adventurous, and I will definitely be rereading it.

Before I’d read this book, I’d stubbornly told myself that I didn’t like reading verse (too many dry poems in school…), but as both a fan of Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and an ancient Roman culture nerd, this book called out to me, and I’m glad it did.

The engaging, sarcastic, honest voice of the teen bride Zuleika (the protagonist) combined with a story of love (lust), friendship, identity, jealously and ego, made the book hard to put down. Her voice grows with every new 'diary’ entry, as she changes from a child to a wife to a woman who knows her mind, all the while remaining vulnerable and beautifully human.

I tried to furrow my brow with concern
but I felt I was watching a B-rate play

with C-rate actors, sitting in a D-rate seat
ae the amphitheatre.

While there are scatterings of Latin phrases, the meaning is never too cryptic, especially when mixed with slang and modern turns of phrase. For me at least, this clever mixture of language made the book more compelling. Evaristo also subtly weaves in narratives of those underrepresented in traditional history books, reminding us that black people, immigrants and transexuals were a part of Roman Britain.

There are twists, turns, laughter and tears, and I have already bought a copy for a friend’s birthday.

Blurb: Scroll back eighteen hundred years to Londinium, AD 211, and slip down the side of Gracechurch Street. Here roams a back-alley beauty, a pulcherrima babe, a Nubian knock-out with tangled hair and bare feet.

Zuleika is a reluctant teenage bride with no idea about true love. She’s too busy sneaking out with the slave girls and drag queens. Until one day she catches the eye of the most powerful man on earth, Emperor Septimus, and the trouble really starts…

Silver-tongued and merry-eyed, this is a tale to make the muses themselves roar with laughter and weep for pity. Kaleidoscoping distant past and vivid present, The Emperor’s Babe sings a song of womanhood and of survival in this thrilling, brutal, breathless world.