With her renowned storytelling gifts in full force, Colleen McCullough delivers a breathtaking novel that proves once again that she is the top historical novelist of our time.

Grand in scope and vivid in detail, McCullough's gripping narrative thrusts readers headlong into the complex and fascinating world of Rome in the tumultuous last days of the Republic. At the height of his power, Gaius Julius Caesar becomes embroiled in a civil war in Egypt, where he finds himself enraptured by Cleopatra, the nation's golden-eyed queen. To do his duty as a Roman, however, he must forsake his love and return to the capital to rule.

Though Caesar's grip on power seems unshakable, the political landscape is treacherous -- the returning hero has no obvious successor, and his legacy seems to be the prize for any man with the courage and cunning to fell Rome's laurelled leader. Caesar's jealous enemies masquerade as friends and scheme to oust the autocrat from power and restore true republican government to Rome. But as the plot races to its dramatic conclusion, it becomes clear that with the stakes this high, no alliance is sacred and no motives are pure.

'A gorgeous, wildly seductive novel, shimmering with intelligence, humour and joy' - Sarah Waters Financial Times Book of the Year In 1838 Frederic Chopin, George Sand and her children travel to a monastery in Mallorca. They are there to create and to convalesce, to live a simple life after the wildness of their Paris days. Witness to this tumultuous arrival is Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl who has been at the monastery for over three hundred years. Blanca's was a life cut short and she is outraged. Having lived in a world full, according to her mother, of 'beautiful men', she has found that in death it is the women she falls for, their beauty she cannot turn away from, and it is the women and girls who, over her centuries in the village and at the monastery, she has sought to protect from the attentions of men with what little power she has. And then George Sand arrives, this beautiful woman in a man's clothes, and Blanca is in love. But the rest of the village is suspicious of the newcomers, and as winter sets in, as George tries to keep her family and herself from falling apart, as Chopin writes prelude after prelude in despair on his tuneless piano, their stay looks likely to end in disaster . . . Heady with the delicious scent of the Mediterranean, richly witty, and utterly compulsive, Briefly, A Delicious Life is a story about convention and breaking convention, about love - yearning, secret, forbidden, unrequited - and about men and women and the cruelty they mete out to one another. 'Exquisite' - New York Times 'Deeply enjoyable' - Telegraph 'Electrifyingly beautiful, exhilaratingly clever . . . sensual, original, intelligent and brimming with love' - Imogen Hermes Gowar

It is 48 AD, a time when Rome rules the world and astrologers rule Rome.

Agrippina, the emperor Claudius' niece, reads in the stars that someone born in Alexandria on July 19, 32 AD, is destined to help raise her son, the future emperor Nero, to the throne of the Caesars. This fated young man is Epaphroditus, a library slave and the book's narrator, who at the age of 16 is taken by force to Rome to serve young Nero.

Epaphroditus becomes Nero's confidant as the art-obsessed Caesar dreams of an age when music rules the world. After Nero performs his musical spectacles in public, apocalyptic Christians--believing him to be the antichrist--set Rome afire.

Revolutionary unrest strikes Rome, a fiery comet makes a foreboding appearance, and the young emperor makes a concert tour of Greece as enemies sprout like Hydra's heads. Epaphroditus, fortified by the return of his faith in astrology, discovers that he, Nero's protector, is fated to kill his Caesar.

Author Humphry Knipe's brilliant historical novel shakes the rafters of conventional belief about Nero and his Rome and the ancient science of astrology. As Michael Grant, the preeminent published expert on the Roman Empire, says: "The belief in astrology was so predominant in the Mediterranean world that it exceeded every religion in power and influence. I admire Humphry Knipe's ingenuity in weaving an imaginative and fascinating story around it in "The Nero Prediction.""

Miriam T. Griffin, the author of "Nero: The End of a Dynasty," writes: ""The Nero Prediction" captures very imaginatively an aspect of ancient thinking that conventional scholarship ignores. . . . It contributes to understanding the ancient mental landscape."