Adonijah: A Tale of the Jewish Dispersion.

The year is 70 CE. Jerusalem has fallen, and Adonijah, a proud Hebrew warrior, watches everything he loves reduced to ash. Captured, enslaved, and dragged to Rome, he becomes property in the household of a Roman noble, his spirit not broken but twisted by grief and the particular humiliation of serving the very people who destroyed his world. In the enemy capital, he finds himself haunted by the weight of his loss, the silence of his God, and the slow burn of a hatred he cannot release. Then he meets Lucia Claudia, a vestal virgin bound by sacred Roman law to chastity and the service of Vesta. She is beautiful. She is everything his people were taught to despise. And yet something dangerous sparks between them, a connection that cuts across the ruins of two civilizations. Strickland crafts a novel about identity under siege: what remains of a man when his nation is erased, when his freedom is stolen, when the God he trusted seems silent? This is a story of survival, yes, but more specifically of the terrifying possibility that love and hatred might live in the same broken heart.