Simon Scarrow Audiobooks

A teacher’s instincts underpin everything Simon Scarrow writes. Born in Nigeria in 1962 and brought up moving between countries, he settled in England and taught for years at City College Norwich before the books took over. Norfolk is still home. The classroom left its mark: he explains how a Roman army actually worked in the way a good teacher does, without ever halting the story to do it.

His long project is Eagles of the Empire, begun in 2000 with Under the Eagle and now twenty-five novels deep. It follows Macro, a blunt career centurion, and Cato, the bookish young recruit who ends up outranking him, from the invasion of Britain to the far edges of Nero’s world. The friendship is the engine; the campaigning is merely the fuel.

He has also written a quartet about Wellington and Napoleon, the Gladiator books for younger readers, and a run of thrillers set in wartime Berlin, but it is the legions that made him one of Britain’s most dependably bestselling historical novelists.

Twenty-five novels in, The Sword of Rome carries Macro and Cato a thousand miles from Rome to the northern shore of the Black Sea, where a Scythian army is answering Nero’s ambitions with fire and a city faces massacre and famine. Cato has a private terror to manage as well: hostages left behind in Rome, and a very short list of people he can trust.

Newcomers can begin here without homework. Scarrow has always built each campaign as a self-contained problem, sketching in the running history as he goes. At around thirteen hours it is a full-length listen, and the shape is the familiar and satisfying one: a march, a siege, a decision that costs somebody dearly.

It is a new arrival, so listener ratings have yet to gather. Long-standing followers of the legion will want it for the anniversary alone. Have a look below.