Cleopatra: A Novel - Hardcover

El-Arifi, Saara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593875648 ISBN 13: 9780593875643

Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Cleopatra tells her own story in this evocative and sensuous historical epic from the bestselling and award-winning author of Faebound and The Final Strife.

“Enchanting, smart, and subversive—this is El-Arifi’s masterpiece.”—R.F. Kuang, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Katabasis

This stunning edition includes designed endpapers and a custom case stamp.

YOU KNOW MY NAME, BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW ME.

Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love's thrall.

Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves.

Your poets sing of my bloodlust, but I was always protecting my children.

How wilfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic, and divinely blessed to rule.

Death will silence me no longer.

This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Saara El-Arifi is an internationally bestselling and award winning author of fantasy and historical fiction. El-Arifi knew she was a storyteller from the moment she told her first lie. Over the years, she has perfected her tall tales into epic ones. She has lived in many countries, had many jobs, and owned many more cats. After a decade of working in marketing and communications, she returned to academia to complete a master’s degree in African studies specialising in Cleopatra’s myth and her impact on Black women. She currently resides in London as a full-time procrastinator.

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Chapter One

51 BCE

I bit into the flesh of the fig, its skin warmed by the heat of the sun.

Charmion watched me through half-­lidded eyes as I chewed. The wind tousled her linen dress and tugged the collar to reveal the sun-­touched glow of her skin.

For all the years of my life, Charmion had been my companion and handmaiden. Her mother had been my nursemaid. And so, we were forever bonded by the milk that had strengthened us as babes. At eighteen years of age our eyes still sparkled with possibility, but our cheeks had slimmed from the plumpness of youth.

Though there were some remarkable moments in the years prior, my story for you starts here. The day I became Pharaoh.

The crunching of the fig’s seeds in my mouth were the only sound between us.

Then Charmion spoke, her voice solemn. “You cannot deny the inevitable.”

I placed the half-­eaten fruit on the ground between us. With my other hand I lifted the playing sticks and clenched them in my fist.

“I do not think your win is inevitable.”

We spoke to each other in Arabic, one of the nine languages we had been schooled in. Though we used both Egyptian and Greek in court, Arabic was just for us.

It had all started when a travelling hakawati had passed through Alexandria from the great city of Gaza. I was eleven years old and had already developed a fondness for stories.

I begged my father to invite the storyteller to the palace. For three nights the hakawati took up residence in the temple. And for all three nights that was where Charmion and I stayed. His tales filled us with wonder, so much so that I requested to keep him.

“I am not yours to shelve like an ornament or trinket,” the hakawati said. The guards by the temple entrance bristled but I paid them no heed.

“Why not?” I asked with genuine curiosity. I had not yet found something I could not make my own. I was a Ptolemy. My blood was lit with the spark of divinity.

The hakawati smiled politely, far more conscious of the guards at his back than I. “Would you ask a fish to stop swimming?”

I thought about it. The truth was, yes, I would if I wanted to eat it, but that wasn’t the answer I thought he was looking for. “No.”

“Would you ask a hippo to stop smiling?”

“Never.”

“Then you cannot ask a hakawati to stop travelling. It is in our nature. Without it, we will run out of stories. And without stories I would have nothing to tell.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. That sounded very dire indeed.

The hakawati saw my distress and kneeled on the ground beside me. “Do not worry, there is another way to keep a part of me here. Tell my stories, again and again.”

My smile returned. I could do that.

For years Charmion and I had repeated the hakawati’s tales, every story blossoming into something new with each retelling. It was then that Arabic became the language between us.

I looked at Charmion now. The sincerity of her expression had melted away into something more playful.

“Look at the markers—­you may as well concede,” she said.

I stood up with the pretence that I needed a better vantage point to view the senet board. I was cunning that way, always performing something or another. Manipulative, the unkind would go on to claim, but I did not see it that way.

From the moment my first cry rattled from my chest, I was taught to be something more than I was. I wanted to be a babe, but I had been born a pharaoh’s daughter. So they wiped the birthing ichor from my skin and swaddled me in gold-­trimmed cloth. My cries were silenced by a polished amber stone, a poor replacement for a mother’s teat.

Despite being too young to remember the stone’s weight, sometimes I still imagined it lying heavy against my tongue. It tripped my words and filled out my cheeks, especially when I chose to be bold.

“C-­concede? I will not.”

We were playing on the balcony in the lighthouse, my place of serenity and solace. Close enough to the god Re to feel his gaze beating against my brow, and far enough away from my duties at the palace. Even with the furnace above us radiating heat, it was preferable to the burning of many eyes wherever I went. Sometimes, if the wind blew east, the smoke would wind its way to my bedroom window, seasoning my sleep with embers and ash.

The board game lay on the ground between us. Charmion was the better player, but I was too proud to admit it. Instead, I began each game with the same foolish hope that one day I’d best her.

I rolled the playing sticks in my hand in frustration. “Amun’s wrath,” I cursed as a splinter pierced my palm.

“Are you well?” Charmion asked with concern. A light sheen of sweat glistened above her top lip.

I took the opportunity to brandish my hand towards her. But instead of displaying my wound, I surged forward and thrust the playing sticks over the balcony.

Charmion’s eyes met mine, one dark eyebrow quirked. “So, you do concede?”

“Never,” I said with a grin.

Charmion laughed and together we peered over the balcony’s edge.

Alexandria lay before me. The city had neither the beauty of Rome nor the grandeur of Babylon. No, Alexandria was not a city to be admired, it was far more than that. It lived and breathed like a beast.

Sailors called to one another across the harbour, the cacophony of many languages resonating throughout the city like a pack of wolves yipping and howling in the hunt. Though we were far above the docks, I could smell the brackish char of eels being cooked over fire. Boats undulated on the waves along the expanse of the coast, their many-­coloured sails glittering like scales on a sea snake.

To the south, the Heptastadion causeway connected the lighthouse’s isle to the mainland. Beyond that, the awnings of market stalls lined the streets and though I couldn’t see them, I imagined the traders gesturing emphatically to their customers.

You could not separate the citizens from the city’s heartbeat; they were one and the same. Asiatic, Parthian, Greek, Egyptian; no matter their origin, the silt of the Nile Delta thickened their blood. It brought a wildness to the city, tamed only by the pharaohs who ruled over it—­my family.

Soon to be me.

But I was not sure I had the fortitude to bridle the people of Egypt.

My doubts were not new, though they had grown more prominent since my father’s affliction. He did not have much time left before departing this world for the next.

As he got sicker and sicker, I became tormented by dreams of my own reflection; like the facets of a jewel, each side a different version of the pharaoh I was to be. One was cruel and callous, another gracious and gentle. Every echo of my being was a stranger to me, and I would awaken bathed in a chilling sweat, haunted by the outlanders in my mind.

I was not ready to be Pharaoh. Though I wonder if I ever would have reached true readiness. Without the skill of prophecy, I was always going to be ill-­prepared for the years that followed. No one could have been prepared to live the life I would go on to lead. I must forgive my younger self this flaw, if nothing else.

Charmion leaned over the balcony, her brows pinched, unaware of my dark thoughts. “I don’t think we can see what you rolled from here, so we shall presume I won.”

A sudden breeze plucked a braid from the knot above my head. Charmion immediately moved to tuck it back into my diadem.

Her fingers grazed the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ballantine Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593875648
• ISBN 13: 9780593875643
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: SC; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/; ; CL MODESTO LAFUENTE 41; Madrid; Madrid; Spanien