The opening of a chest. A worn diary, read by the trembling light of a lantern.

Within those pages, moments turn into years, and memory brings back one of Rome’s darkest seasons: the civil war that, in 80 BC, drenched the Republic in blood and forced it to fight against itself.

Gaius Aemilius Rufus is a young recruit enlisted in the cohorts of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. He is not yet the soldier History will remember. He is inexperienced, fragile, disillusioned, dragged into a conflict he does not fully understand. His name is not new: we have already encountered him as a hardened, unyielding man. Here we discover him before the armor, before certainty, before scars.

From the snow-covered mountains of the Pyrenees to naval battles off the African coast, Aemilius is trained to fight one of Rome’s most dangerous enemies: Quintus Sertorius, a brilliant and charismatic general, the ideal heir of Gaius Marius. In Hispania, a harsh and rebellious land, Aemilius faces war in its cruelest form: exhausting marches, ambushes, betrayals, assassinations. He endures the arrogance of his superiors, learns to respect the enemy, learns to obey, to resist, to lose.

He loves, he fights, he survives, and he loses everything.

When all hope seems lost, Gaius Aemilius crosses the sea and reaches the scorching deserts of Mauretania. Covered in dust and sweat, burned by the sun, starving and alone, he finally meets the enemy he had been trained to hate. There, at the extreme limit of human endurance, his journey finally finds its meaning.

As fire shapes iron, war transforms him. And from those ashes is born the soldier destined to take his place among the immortals.

Centurio is the story of the birth of a man in a world that grants no mercy. A novel of military formation, human and ruthless, where civil war creates no victors, but forges what remains of those who survive.

Italian Edition
Newton Compton – October 2017 – 384 pages 
ISBN: 978-84-666-5882-9