The Key

Historical novel on Catullus’ life: perfect for those nights before the fire.
The first volume of a dazzling trilogy, The Key shows a world on the verge of collapse through the eyes of its greatest and most passionate poet. Gaius Valerius Catullus, the boy from the provinces who became the lover of the most powerful and beautiful married woman in Rome, is dead at twenty-nine. His friend Marcus Caelius Rufus must search for the meaning of his life in the slums and bloody secret cults, the palaces and law courts of the tottering Roman Republic. Vivid, exciting, carefully researched and beautifully written, The Key has been a cult favorite in hardbound for years. Jaro inserts English translations of and comments on Catullus’ poems into the text of her novel, The Key.

Special Features

• Written with the most scrupulous attention to historical accuracy
• Contains some 40 poems of Catullus’, in acclaimed translations by the author. Some have appeared in the recent anthology Catullus in English, and the author’s original interpretation of the most important of them, poem 58, has influenced contemporary approaches to that work
• May be read independently as a single novel, or as the first volume of the trilogy The Key, The Lock, The Door in the Wall
• Features maps of Rome and the Empire, specially drawn for the novel
• Includes reader-friendly list of Principal Characters and a Chronology of Events in the novel