You don’t often read a novel set in ancient Roman Britain that feels less like a history lesson and more like a quiet interrogation. Not of an empire, but of the soul. Brothers isn’t loud. It doesn’t charge into battle. It waits—simmering, studying, and quietly unsettling you.
The plot unfolds like a whisper behind heavy Roman doors: a child falls ill, his family imports a local Celtic boy to lift his spirits, and the boundaries between necessity, morality, and cruelty begin to blur. But this isn’t a story of redemption or revolution. Instead, it’s a long meditation on ownership—of people, decisions, guilt, and consequences. Every character here is either possessed or trying not to be.
Taylor does something rare. Instead of glorifying historical spectacle, she slows time. The tension is not in the clash of armies but in glances that last too long, in silences too heavy, in choices made in passing that calcify into regrets. The family dynamics are as richly drawn as any modern psychological novel. Aelia, the mother, is not evil. Lucius, the father, is not heartless. Even Palatus, the steward who sets much of the plot in motion, isn’t cruel for the sake of it. They’re just… people. And that’s what makes the story so hard to ignore.
There’s a moment when the captured boy is brought into the home—cleaned, trimmed, polished into a version the family can tolerate. But to Gaius, the ill Roman child who requested him, the boy is no longer the person he longed for. This scene alone captures the core of the novel: how, in the effort to make someone “fit,” we strip away what made them meaningful.
The writing is patient. Sometimes, even indulgent. But it matches the slow pace of power—how decisions in powerful households echo in the corridors long after they’re made. Taylor’s greatest gamble is her restraint. She doesn’t rush character arcs. She lets us dwell in the discomfort. And the discomfort lingers.
Brothers isn’t for those needing a tidy resolution. It’s for readers who prefer questions that haunt more than answers that soothe. It’s for anyone who’s ever wondered what happens after a child gets what they want—and someone else loses what they had.
Five stars, because historical fiction this reflective, this human, this strangely modern in its moral ambiguity, doesn’t come around often.
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