Echo Cycle

Gladiator meets 1984 in this near-future thriller featuring timeslips, ancient magic and a disturbingly plausible dystopian Britain...

One day, a boy fell down a hole in time and banged his head. When he woke up he met the Emperor Nero, who promptly killed himself.

2070. A dozen English public schoolboys are on a trip to Rome in a prosperous and technologically advanced Europe worlds away from a post-Brexit Britain marred by food shortages, poverty and a totalitarian state. Outsider Miliband Monk is captivated by the gleaming metropolis, and desperate to stay out of the way of tormentors who bully him for his sexuality in his ultra-conservative home, and longs for what he sees as the liberal utopia of modern Europe. When Monk finally snaps and leaves one of his bullies badly injured, he flees into the city, and vanishes completely.

Twenty-five years later, Monk's best friend Banks returns to Rome part of a rare diplomatic mission to the continent, and meets a wild-haired vagrant whom he realizes is a much aged, haggard Monk. His friend claims he has been in ancient Rome for all these years, living under the Caesars. This emergence sparks a conflict in the tinderbox of modern diplomatic relations, whose mysterious origins hark back to the ancient world itself...