Kirjahaku

You are the high spirited 19-year-old daughter of a penniless widow, born and brought up on an isolated, windswept South Atlantic island, a girl with virtually no prospects, when out of the blue the most famous man on earth falls into your lap.Still smarting from his defeat at Waterloo, still the hero of Liberals everywhere, Napoleon has been exiled to tiny Saint Helena because it is the remotest and most easily defended island in the British Empire. But far from being broken by defeat, Napoleon's fertile imagination seethes with escape schemes. He meets you on his first evening on the island and instantly knows he has found what he is looking for: someone to set him free.This clandestine affair between an imprisoned emperor and the island girl he calls Rosebud has a very personal backstory, writes the author. When he was a child back home in South Africa his grandfather, who emigrated from Saint Helena in the late 1880's, often spoke about his family's acquaintance with the great man. A big print of Napoleon hung on his living room wall. "Remember that we have been touched by greatness," were his enigmatic last words.When he researched this claim many years later and discovered the Rosebud legend Humphry Knipe realized why his grandfather, a Victorian gentleman, hadn't gone into detail. Charlotte Knipe, said to be the most beautiful girl on Saint Helena at the time, is on record as having been a frequent guest of the emperor and rumored to have been his lover. Rosebud is the author's great-great-grandaunt. The "touch of greatness" was Napoleon's.

Laughable today, in the ancient world astrology exceeded every religion in power and influence. All your astrologer needed was your birth time to draw up a horoscope which predicted your future. He could provide other services. If you gave him your enemy's birth time he could predict the outcome of your future interactions with him. For this reason the birth times of prominent men and women were closely guarded secrets.Enter the self fulfilling prophecy. So ardent was the belief in astrology that believers were seduced into tailoring their actions to match astrological predictions. An unlucky prediction empowered your enemies and dismayed your friends. So it was with Nero. His birth time became widely known and was used to choose the exact moment that he was pronounced emperor and the exact time he was destined to die.It is 48 AD. Epaphroditus, a sixteen-year-old Alexandrian library slave, is shipped to Agrippina, the scheming niece of the emperor Claudius. She is convinced that the young scribe's horoscope predicts that he is destined to help her raise her son, the future emperor Nero, to the throne of the Caesars. Nero, a man of considerable generosity, talent, great ingenuity and boundless energy is committed to making his life a work of art. He dreams of an age in which music, not military force, is power. But "musical war" is an abomination to the apocalyptic Christians who set Rome on fire when "the Antichrist" performs in public. Despite the ominous arrival of Halley's comet, Nero insists on a yearlong concert tour of Greece allowing his enemies back in Rome to sprout like hydra's heads. Nero outrages aristocratic Romans by giving Epaphroditus a hero's triumph for foiling the great conspiracy aimed at dethroning him. Little does Nero realize that his most trusted supporter is fated to help him keep his final date with destiny

PC is a porn star whose star is fading. Disillusioned and destitute, she is on the point of accepting that her career choice was a soul destroying disaster when she meets a beautiful girl with a false ID who persuades PC to become her agent. PC agonizes over leading someone down the same dead end path she has taken - until she discovers that she is a pawn in the girl's grand game.