Acté

Rome, in the early years of Nero's reign. The emperor is still young - charming, volatile, not yet the figure history will condemn - and the woman he loves is a Greek freedwoman named Acté. She did not seek his attention, and she has no illusions about the world she now moves through: a court built on flattery, betrayal, and the constant proximity of violence.

But Acté loves him. And in the hidden streets of the city, she has found something else - a community of believers who speak of mercy and resurrection in a language utterly unlike anything the empire offers. Between the world of the palace and the world of the catacombs, she must decide who she is and what she can live with.

Acté is Alexandre Dumas at his most intimate and unexpected - a novel of conscience set at the heart of imperial decadence, written before the great adventures that would make him famous and showing a side of his imagination those adventures rarely reveal. Drawing on the ancient sources with a novelist's freedom, Dumas resurrects one of history's most quietly remarkable women: the freedwoman who loved Nero before he became a monster, and who, when the end came, did not abandon him.

Overlooked for too long, Acté is a masterwork of historical fiction - tender, clear-eyed, and finally devastating.