While Rome Burns

Battlestar Gallactica meets HBO’s Rome

In the world of 2032, climate change has caused drought, destruction, and human migration on a scale never before seen. Green-conscious, idealistic Victoria leaves her privileged first-world life for her beloved Rome, Italy, to do what she can to alleviate the refugee crisis there. But she is soon targeted for a different mission entirely: to find something—or someone—from the past to solve the catastrophe threatening to destroy her own civilization.

Julius Caesar, before his Forum in Rome

Struck by lightning in a violent electrical storm, Victoria is thrown back to the days of the late Republic. There, guided by the intelligence behind the storm, she breaks into Rome’s highest echelons—the world of Cicero, Mark Antony, Brutus, and the progressive but ruthless Julius Caesar himself. Victoria catches Caesar’s eye, not only because of her foreign ways but also her unusual intuitions about the future—and he wants to know what she knows.

The two dance around each other but draw ever closer, forming a bond impossible in either time period. As the political swirl leading to Caesar’s assassination accelerates, Victoria must decide whether changing the past will save the future—or destroy it.

Author Laura Matthews is currently seeking representation for While Rome Burns, the first of a trilogy, and is working on Book Two, Veni, Vedi, Vici.