Sparrow

An ageing man who calls himself Jacob writes from an abandoned Roman settlement in Britain and reconstructs the childhood in which he possessed neither a secure name nor control over his own body. Bought as an enslaved child and raised in the brothel and tavern called the Helicon in Carthago Nova, he lives first beneath the kitchen table, cared for unevenly by the cook Focaria and by the women known as the wolves. Euterpe’s stories, the garden and his fascination with birds allow him to imagine a self beyond the names imposed upon him: Pusus, Mouse and, secretly, Sparrow.

As Christianity becomes more powerful in the city and the Helicon’s fragile economy deteriorates, the violence surrounding Sparrow intensifies. The manager Audo, the brothel’s owner and the customers who treat enslaved people as property threaten the only family he has known, while Sparrow’s growing awareness of slavery makes freedom both imaginable and perilous. The novel presents late Roman Hispania from below, using one boy’s coming of age to explore coercion, sexual exploitation, chosen kinship, memory and the difficult construction of an identity that can survive captivity.