About

Alessandro Catorcini

I write historical fiction about the people the record leaves out — the soldiers who survived the battles that made others famous, and the makers whose inventions outlived their names.

I was born in Genoa, Italy, and I live in Bellevue, Washington, where I work as a technology executive. I studied Latin and Greek in school and fell in love with the classical world then; the novels are what that love turned into. I write in both Italian and English — the Italian editions of my books appear under separate cover.

My novels reach into the less-told corners of the ancient world — the people and turns of fortune that shaped the world we live in now, and that most histories hurry past. They share a single motif rather than a plot: the shield, and what it means to carry one — or to leave one behind. Two are out now. The Farthest Shield follows a soldier through the catastrophe at Carrhae and a forty-year march east, all the way to the Han frontier at the edge of the known world. The Shield Left Behind is the story of a survivor of Cannae who carries a battered, faded shield through fourteen years of disgrace, Sicilian exile, and the long unmaking of Hannibal — toward a field in Africa called Zama, where he will learn at last whether he ran, or only survived. A third, The Hammer and the Shield, set in the naval war of the First Punic War, is on the way.

The workshop

When I'm not writing, I'm building — home infrastructure, small hardware projects, automation, and whatever else earns a place on the bench. The notebook is where I write those up: what I made, what broke, and what I'd do differently. It's the engineering half of the same curiosity that produces the books.

Keeping in touch

The best way to hear about a new book is the notebook list — a few emails a year, only when there's something real to share. No last names, no noise.