Erryn Lee writes...

'What Remains' is a dual timeline Historical Fiction that circles events in Ancient Rome and culminating in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79 and also in Ukraine in the modern day.  In the following extract, see how I have embedded research into the revised date of the eruption (see post History Mystery) for more details.   𝛀  The morning, which had started chill enough for Thalia to have hovered over the small glowing brazier, had turned warm. The cloak she had draped about Aglaea had long since been discarded and, along with her own, was bunched over Charis’s left arm. Hooked over the girl’s skinny right arm was the basket filled with their morning purchases.  The cooler weather had heralded the return of the seasonal holidaymakers, who descended on the seaside town in droves for the cooler climate and breezes during the hottest months of summer. Well did Thalia recall the sweltering season when all who owned or could rent villas on the coast left Rome en masse to escape the

Pomegranate tree from fresco in the Villa of Livia When teaching ‘History’ the first thing I try to instil in my students is an understanding that history is not truth, it is versions and interpretations. What does this mean?  The answer is simple. History is what we assume happened until we know better. Where it is well recorded we can know definitive things like dates of events, but the further back we go and the more reprints we have to work through the more likely even this is flawed. What we cannot know is motivations and what we deal with is interpretations. Every account of history has issues with bias and perspective. Who saw what, from where and what personal prejudices and experiences did they draw on to interpret it? And that is a first hand account, not taking into account the revisions, translations and further interpretations of countless people who carried the ‘history’ into the present. Take for example the known history of the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD79. We know M