I am very excited about this book coming out soon!!!

LeGuin, one of my favorite writers, decided to tackle one of my current favorite places–ancient Italy. She’s delving back even further than I am in my book about Apicius, however, giving voice to Lavinia, who is unspoken in Virgil’s famous epic.

From Publisher’s Weekly: In the Aeneid, the only notable lines Virgil devotes to Aeneas’ second wife, Lavinia, concern an omen: the day before Aeneus lands in Latinum, Lavinia’s hair is veiled by a ghost fire, presaging war. Le Guin’s masterful novel gives a voice to Lavinia, the daughter of King Latinus and Queen Amata, who rule Latinum in the era before the founding of Rome. Amata lost her sons to a childhood sickness and has since become slightly mad. She is fixated on marrying Lavinia to Amata’s nephew, Turnus, the king of neighboring Rutuli. It’s a good match, and Turnus is handsome, but Lavinia is reluctant. Following the words of an oracle, King Latinus announces that Lavinia will marry Aeneas, a newly landed stranger from Troy; the news provokes Amata, the farmers of Latinum, and Turnus, who starts a civil war. Le Guin is famous for creating alternative worlds (as in Left Hand of Darkness), and she approaches Lavinia’s world, from which Western civilization took its course, as unique and strange as any fantasy. It’s a novel that deserves to be ranked with Robert Graves’s I, Claudius. (Apr.)

Virgil was wildly popular during the time in which my book is set. Apicius was a boy when Virgil died while traveling with Caesar Augustus to Greece. Apparently Virgil had ordered the book to be burned after he died as he knew he would be unable to finish the tale. Caesar defied those last wishes and ordered it published (some scholars speculate that Aeneas is actually a representation of Augustus), and it was then that the story took life as Rome’s national epic, symbolizing the mission of Imperial Rome, exemplifying piety and virtue and delighting audiences throughout the empire. It is likely that Apicius would have had Virgil’s writing read at one of his many parties.

The book comes out on April 21. I can hardly wait!