Alison Morton

Alison Morton crafts alternate-history thrillers centered on Roma Nova, a modern Roman society shaped by female inheritance and leadership. Insurrectio is the fifth published Roma Nova novel and belongs to the strand following Aurelia Mitela. Set during political instability in the 1980s, it confronts Aurelia with a nationalist movement, a hesitant ruler, and the return of a determined enemy. Published by SilverWood Books in April 2016, the story is a fast-paced political thriller. Morton’s own account places Insurrectio within a second trilogy that begins with Aurelia and continues through Retalio, while later novellas fill gaps within that chronology. Her academic work in history and earlier military service informed the sequence’s institutional and political detail. Insurrectio consequently joins its speculative Roman state to recognizable pressures involving reform, propaganda, loyalty, and resistance. Readers meet Alison Morton as both a world-builder and thriller writer, using Aurelia’s personal history to make a struggle over government feel immediate, dangerous, and emotionally consequential.