Egypt, 1350 BCE. The most powerful empire on earth is about to tear itself apart - from the inside.
When the young pharaoh Akhenaten abandons Thebes, shuts down the temples, and builds a gleaming new capital in the desert dedicated to a single god, he sets in motion a revolution that will reshape Egyptian civilization. In Akhetaten, his city of light, the old rules are dead. The old gods are forbidden. The old art, with its rigid formulas and eternal poses, is replaced by something radical: truth.
Bek, the royal sculptor, is summoned to this desert experiment and ordered to carve what he sees - not the idealized pharaoh of tradition, but the strange, elongated, entirely human king who believes he can simplify God. As the city rises around him, Bek creates the most revolutionary art Egypt has ever seen. But he also begins to carve something in secret - an honest portrait of the man behind the revolution, a portrait no successor will ever want to find.
A thousand miles to the north, the Egyptian officer Amenmose watches the empire crumble. Stationed in the ancient port city of Byblos, he sends report after report to a capital that never answers. The Amarna Letters - one of the greatest archives of diplomatic correspondence ever discovered - document the real pleas for help that went unanswered while Akhenaten looked at the sun. Amenmose is the man on the other end of that silence.
Two men. Two perspectives. One reign that tried to remake the world and nearly destroyed an empire.
HERETIC is grounded in the archaeological record - the Amarna Letters, the sculptor's workshops discovered at the site, the revolutionary art style, the open-roofed temples, the mysterious disappearance of Queen Nefertiti - while filling the gaps with fiction so plausible you won't know where the history ends and the invention begins.
The first book in the PHARAOH series, a collection of standalone historical novels spanning three thousand years of Egyptian civilization. Each book tells the story of a different pharaoh's reign through the eyes of the people who lived it.
