Published in 2024
400 pages
Costanza Casati was born in Texas in 1995 and grew up in a village in Northern Italy, where she studied Ancient Greek, and Ancient Greek literature, under one of the country’s most rigorous academic programmes. She is a graduate of the prestigious Warwick Writing MA in the UK, and worked as a screenwriter and journalist. Clytemnestra is her debut novel. It has sold into 18 territories worldwide, is a Times bestseller, an Indie Next Pick, and was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown Award.
What is this book about?
From the author of the bestselling Clytemnestra comes another intoxicating excursion into ancient history, as Casati reimagines the rise to power of the Assyrian empire’s only female ruler, Semiramis.
When kings fall, queens rise.
Nothing about Semiramis’s upbringing could have foretold her legacy or the power she would come to wield. A female ruler, once an orphan raised on the outskirts of an empire – certainly no one in Ancient Assyria would bend to her command willingly. Semiramis was a woman who knew if she wanted power, she would have to claim it.
There are whispers of her fame in Mesopotamian myth- Semiramis was a queen, an ambitious warrior, a commander whose reputation reaches the majestic proportions of Alexander the Great. Historical record, on the other hand, falls eerily quiet.
In her second novel, Costanza Casati brilliantly weaves myth and ancient history together to give Semiramis a voice, charting her captivating ascent to a throne no one promised her. The world Casati expertly builds is rich with dazzling detail and will transport her readers to the heat of the Assyrian Empire and a world long gone.
