The Lock-Keeper's Academy
A Novel of Ancient Alexandria

About this book:

In the sweltering summer of ancient Alexandria, the Great Library’s ink runs black with soot and silt—just like the Nile rising far too early, far too violently, downstream. Seventeen-year-old Philo dreams of copying Sophocles but is condemned to tax ledgers, until the river’s crimson surge drags him from the scriptorium’s dust into the city’s beating heart: the colossal, groaning lock-works that hold back the flood. There, the legendary Lock-Keeper Menander battles timber, bronze, and a current laced with grinding sand, guarding the secret arteries that keep three hundred thousand souls alive.

But the water is not the only thing rising. In the marble halls, a Prefect schemes; in the shadowed canals, a saboteur weakens the gates; and in the academies, scholars calculate the math of catastrophe. As the inundation turns the canals into weapons, Philo and Menander—scholar and engineer, ink-stained and mud-slicked—must decipher the river’s murderous language before the walls breach and Alexandria drowns in mud and politics.

*The Lock-Keeper’s Academy* is a masterwork of historical immersion: a novel where hydro-engineering is high drama, where a misread ledger can starve a province, and where the fate of the ancient world’s greatest city rests on the shoulders of a boy with a reed pen and an old man who reads the Nile like a sacred text. atmospheric, intricate, and utterly transporting—this is Alexandria as you have never smelled, heard, or feared it.