Please join author Melanie McDonald as she tours the blogosphere July 18 – September 26 for the release of her novel, Eromenos.

VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR SCHEDULE

Monday, July 18th
Author Guest Post at C.W. Gortner’s Historical Boys

Thursday, July 21st
Review at Bibliophilic Book Blog

Monday, July 25th
Author Guest Post at Christy English’s A Writer’s Life: Working with the Muse
Review & Giveaway at Unabridged Chick

Friday, July 29th
Review at A Writer’s Life: Working with the Muse

Monday, August 1st
Author Interview at Unabridged Chick

Thursday, August 4th
Review at Bibrary Bookslut

Monday, August 8th
Review at Debbie’s Book Bag

Thursday, August 11th
Review at Bonjour, Cass

Monday, August 15th
Review at The Musings of a Book Junkie

Thursday, August 18th
Review at Bippity Boppity Book
Author Guest Post at The Musings of a Book Junkie

Monday, August 22nd
Review & Giveaway at Let Them Read Books

Thursday, August 25th
Review & Giveaway at Broken Teepee
Author Guest Post at Nan Hawthorne’s Booking History

Monday, August 29th
Review at The Book Garden

Thursday, September 1st
Author Guest Post at One Book Shy of a Full Shelf

Monday, September 5th
Author Guest Post at The True Book Addict
Review & Giveaway at One Book Shy of a Full Shelf

Thursday, September 8th
Review at The True Book Addict

Monday, September 12th
Review at Bibliotropic
Review at By the By Books

Thursday, September 15th
Review & Giveaway at A Bookish Affair

Friday, September 16th
Interview at Tribute Books Reviews

Monday, September 19th
Review at Historical Fiction Obsession

Wednesday, September 21st
Author Interview at Historical Fiction Obsession

Monday, September 26th
Review at Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell

{SYNOPSIS}

Eros and Thanatos converge in the story of a glorious youth, an untimely death, and an imperial love affair that gives rise to the last pagan god of antiquity. In this coming-of-age novel set in the second century AD, Antinous of Bithynia, a Greek youth from Asia Minor, recounts his seven-year affair with Hadrian, fourteenth emperor of Rome. In a partnership more intimate than Hadrian’s sanctioned political marriage to Sabina, Antinous captivates the most powerful ruler on earth both in life and after death.

This version of the affair between the emperor and his beloved ephebe vindicates the youth scorned by early Christian church fathers as a “shameless and scandalous boy” and “sordid and loathsome instrument of his master’s lust.” EROMENOS envisions the personal history of the young man who achieved apotheosis as a pagan god of antiquity, whose cult of worship lasted for hundreds of years far longer than the cult of the emperor Hadrian.

In EROMENOS, the young man Antinous, whose beautiful image still may be found in museums around the world, finds a voice of his own at last.

Publication Date:  March 11, 2011
Publisher:  Seriously Good Books
176 pages

Read Excerpt HERE.

PRAISE FOR EROMENOS

What is the nature of love? Of control? These big questions without easy answers are the heart of the book, as we watch Antinous come to his own conclusions about both.

No one knows what happened to the real Antinous. All that is known is that he drowned in the Nile and then Hadrian deified him. McDonald has given us the imaginary voice of a young man whose image has been immortalized in busts and sculptures, a young man who may very well have been as haunted as his death is mysterious.

FOREWORD review

Intelligent, deeply-felt historical fiction like Eromenos is rare enough even in this new golden age of the genre. McDonald has honed her narrative until every phrase glitters. The machinations of other court favorites, the richly-detailed period atmosphere, the wary yet compulsive attraction between the emperor and Antinous all are so richly and intelligently evoked that readers are swept along, forgetting that they already know how this particular story turns out. Eromenos is one of the finest historical novels I’ve read in many years. Readers are urged not to miss it.

Historical Novel Society Online Review, May 2011

ABOUT MELANIE MCDONALD


Melanie McDonald was awarded a 2008 Hawthornden Fellowship for Eromenos and was a finalist at the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. She has an MFA from the University of Arkansas. Her short stories have appeared in New York Stories, Fugue, Indigenous Fiction, and online. An Arkansas native whose Campbell ancestors were Highland Scots, she now lives in Virginia with her husband, Kevin McDonald, the author of Above the Clouds: Managing Risk in the World of Cloud Computing.

For more information, please visit Melanie McDonald’s WEBSITE.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *