Salammbô

Carthage, 240 BCE. The mercenaries who won Carthage's war against Rome have not been paid. They are camped outside the city walls, sixty thousand soldiers from a dozen nations, and they are running out of patience.

At the feast held in their honor, a woman appears among them - Salammbô, daughter of the great general Hamilcar, priestess of the goddess Tanit. Her appearance lasts only moments. It is enough. The Libyan warrior Mathô has seen her, and nothing that follows - war, siege, slaughter, the destruction of armies - will free him from what that moment has begun.

When a sacred object at the heart of Carthage's power is stolen, Salammbô must enter the enemy camp to reclaim it. Between a city fighting for its survival and an army fighting for justice, between a priestess loyal to her goddess and a soldier consumed by an impossible love, Salammbô unfolds as one of the most spectacular novels of the nineteenth century - a vision of the ancient world built from five years of research, two journeys to North Africa, and the full force of Flaubert's extraordinary imagination.

Published in 1862, the year of its author's greatest fame, Salammbô is unlike anything else Flaubert wrote - and unlike almost anything else in fiction. By the author of Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education.