Christmas with the Crooked Cats - 'The Night before Christmas'

I know, there are (thankfully!) a few days yet to go before Christmas Day!  Anyway, that's the title of a short story by another Crooked Cat author offered for the festive season:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/737252102990447/permalink/752166138165710/

http://www.tetaylor.co.uk/#!blog/c1pz

Tim Taylor is the author of Zeus of Ithome (published by Crooked Cat).

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Blurb: Greece, 373 BC. For three centuries, the Messenian people have been brutally subjugated by their Spartan neighbours and forced to work the land as helot slaves. Diocles, a seventeen-year-old helot, has known no other life but servitude. After an encounter with Spartan assassins, he is forced to flee, leaving behind his family and his sweetheart, Elpis. On Mount Ithome, the ancient sanctuary of the Messenians, he meets Aristomenes, an old rebel who still remembers the proud history of their people and clings to a prophecy that they will one day win back their freedom. A forlorn hope, perhaps. But elsewhere in Greece, there are others too who believe it is time that the power of Sparta was broken.

 

Sample reviews: "very engaging narrative interspersed with superbly detailed narrative backdrop."

 

"a superbly well-crafted historical novel, which shows the struggle of the individual against the tide of history but which, at the same time, through what it leaves out, reveals to us the ultimate powerlessness of the individual in a way that the ancient Greeks would well have understood"