'Performing deft feats of Egyptian magic, Michelle Moran transforms stone-cold history-from-hieroglyphs into gripping narrative, peopled by unforgettable characters seething with conflict and passion. Sweeping in scope and meticulous in detail, The Heretic Queen is a novel of passion and power, heartbreak and redemption. Destined to be the most powerful Pharaoh in Egypt, he is also the man who must confront the most famous exodus in history. While political adversity sets the country on edge, Nefertari becomes the wife of Ramesses the Great. Yet all of Egypt opposes this union between the rising star of a new dynasty and the fading star of an old, heretical one. Soon Nefertari catches the eye of the Crown Prince, and despite her family's history, they fall in love and wish to marry. But this changes when she is taken under the wing of the Pharaoh's aunt, then brought to the Temple of Hathor, where she is educated in a manner befitting a future queen. A relic of a previous reign, Nefertari is pushed aside, an unimportant princess left to run wild in the palace. The girl's deceased family has been branded as heretical, and no one in Egypt will speak their names. A devastating palace fire has killed the Eighteenth Dynasty's royal family-all with the exception of Nefertari, the niece of the reviled former queen, Nefertiti.

The winds of change are blowing through Thebes. In ancient Egypt, a forgotten princess must overcome her family's past and remake history.

The heretic queen