A Novel by Nelson Marcelino
Available now in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover.
She has been an adjective for two thousand years. This is her account.
In the court of the Emperor Claudius, Valeria Messalina holds no title. She does not need one. She runs the most powerful household in the ancient world through a system of cultivated jealousies, strategic silence, and the precise deployment of legal machinery — governing Rome with intelligence and without credit, in the one hour before dawn each morning when no one is yet watching.
She is twenty-eight years old. She will not live to twenty-nine.
Messalina: Before the Verdict is told entirely in her own voice: posthumous, clear-eyed, and unwilling to offer the consolations the tradition expects. She does not ask for innocence. She admits what she did — and she contests the word the historians used to explain it.
Written in the tradition of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. For readers of Circe, Hamnet, and Memoirs of Hadrian.
550 pages · 6 × 9 inches · Kindle, paperback, and hardcover Published August 2026
Cover photograph by Jeffrey Pask.
nelsonmarcelino 