Bernardine Evaristo's tale of forbidden love in bustling third-century London is an intoxicating cocktail of poetry, history, and fiction. Feisty, precocious Zuleika, a restless teenage bride of a rich Roman businessman, craves passion and excitement. She wanders through his villa, bored, or sneaks out to see her old friends, seeking an outlet for her creativity. Then she begins an affair with the emperor, Septimus Severus, remembered to history as the "African Emperor," and she knows her life will never be the same. Streetwise, seductive, and lyrical, The Emperor's Babe is a "glittering fiction" with a "heroine of ancient times for the modern age" (the Times).
Contains mature themes.
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Bernardine Evaristo is the Anglo-Nigerian award-winning author of several books of fiction and verse fiction, including the novel Girl, Woman, Other, which won the 2019 Booker Prize. She is the first Black woman to ever have received the Booker Prize. She is professor of creative writing at Brunel University London and vice chair of the Royal Society of Literature. Her writing is characterized by experimentation, daring, and subversion, challenging the myths of various Afro-diasporic histories and identities, and her books range in genre from poetry to short story to drama to criticism. Her books have been chosen as a book of the year thirteen times by British media, and her novel The Emperor’s Babe was a London Times Book of the Decade.