The Chronicles of Dark and Light

The Chronicles of Dark and Light is a trilogy set during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Book One, The Forsaken follows Finn, a slave from Hibernia, and Ansila, an orphaned child driven from the Pontic Steppe by the Huns. Both are caught up in the chaos of the unravelling empire. Finn becomes a scribe of remarkable talent, set to copying religious texts by his owner Pelagius. Ansila joins the warbands of the displaced Goths pillaging the Roman Empire. In book two, Daughters, Finn is sent to Milan to scribe in the library of Bishop Ambrose. He is forced to flee to Rome where his daughter Sophia is sent to work in the Christian household of the Valerii becoming a confidant to Albina, the mother of Melania the Younger. Estranged from Sophia by the actions of his master Pelagius, Finn desperately attempts to keep contact with his daughter. In book three, To the Promised Land, Ansila and his family are caught up in the forty-year exodus of the Goth tribes. As refugees, forced from their ancestral home by the Huns, the Goths traverse the Roman Empire in search of a homeland. Heva, Ansila's wife, seeks to protect her children during the wandering years of the caravan of the Goth nation. We also follow Bissula, the young Swabian companion of the Roman poet and senator Ausonius, as her estate in Gaul is threatened by invading Alamanni. With the anarchy following the Sack of Rome in 410, the fates of all the characters seek identity and security in an unravelling empire. The novel explores the effects of an empire in decline on the minor characters in history at a point that sees the death of classical late antiquity and the tentative beginning of the European Middle Ages.