Atretes the German was sold as a gladiator, and his story is taken up in the last volume as he searches for his missing son and finds the woman who adopted him won’t give him up. What is it about? Set in the 1st century, in the first volume Hadasseh is captured and sold as a slave to the Valerian family in Rome, one of the children of which (Marcus, at first so dissolute) continues the story in the second volume as he searches for meaning in his life. Unusually, Rivers wisely focuses on different characters in each volume, which gives the series more the feeling of three novels than one long story, although they are all linked. She brings the ancient world of Rome, Israel, Ephesus and Germany to noisy, bustling and vibrant life, presenting us with people who are wonderfully three-dimensional. Francine Rivers doesn’t have a time machine, I am sure, but reading her books one might wonder if she does. If you do not understand this, then the work will suffer. Any writer who lives in a modern secular society such as Britain often produces historical fiction that is riddled with anachronism, as all aspects of life in the past were woven through with religious belief. Somebody asked me recently why I enjoy inspirational fiction so much as I am not religious myself.
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