Robert Harris is the author of sixteen bestselling novels: the Cicero Trilogy - Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator - Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, The Fear Index, An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Conclave, Munich, The Second Sleep, V2, Act of Oblivion and Precipice. His work has been translated into forty languages and nine of his books have been adapted for cinema and television. He lives in West Berkshire with his wife, Gill Hornby.

"Harris is the master. With Lustrum, [he] has surpassed himself. It is one of the most exciting thrillers I have ever read" -- Peter Jones Evening Standard "Harris communicates such a strong sense of Imperial Rome - the book is awesomely well-informed about the minutiae of everyday life" Guardian "Thoroughly engaging ... The allure of power and the perils that attend it have seldom been so brilliantly anatomised in a thriller" Sunday Times "Harris never makes his comparisons between Rome and modern Britain explicit, but they are certainly there. And that's the principal charm of his ancient thrillers - their up-to-dateness" Sunday Telegraph "Magnificent ... Better than Robert Graves's Claudius novels" -- Allan Massie Standpoint