Elodie Harper – She Reads Novels

Elodie Harper’s The Wolf Den, about a group of women working in a brothel in ancient Pompeii, was one of my favourite books that I read last year. With the third book in the trilogy on its way, I decided to catch up this summer with the middle novel, The House with the Golden Door. This book picks up the story where The Wolf Den left off, so if you haven’t read the first book yet you may come across spoilers here that you would prefer to avoid.

The House with the Golden Door is again set in Pompeii just a few years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Amara has now escaped enslavement in the notorious Wolf Den and has started a new life as a courtesan under the patronage of the wealthy Rufus. She’s grateful for the opportunities Rufus has given her, but at the same time she misses the friends she’s left behind at the brothel and decides to do whatever it takes to rescue some of them too – a decision that she will begin to regret as it brings her back into the clutches of her old master and pimp, Felix. Life with Rufus also turns out to be not quite what Amara had hoped and she soon discovers that she’s not as ‘free’ as she had imagined.

Like The Wolf Den, this book is completely immersive and although it’s quite long at almost 500 pages, I was never bored. That’s partly because the Pompeii setting is so vivid and believable and partly because I find Amara such an engaging protagonist. In this book, we see her struggling to come to terms with her new status in life and the discovery that her freedom is not all she expected it to be. Despite her powerful new friends, she knows that she owes everything she has to Rufus and if he tires of her she’ll lose everything she has unless she can find another patron to take his place. This means she will always be under the control of one man or another, while not being free to be with the man she truly loves.

If Amara is experiencing conflicting emotions and loyalties, so is her old friend Victoria, who comes to join her in her new household. While grateful to leave her life of slavery at the Wolf Den, Victoria is still drawn to Felix despite everything, which is another source of worry for Amara. However, I enjoyed meeting one of the other Wolf Den women, the Iceni slave Britannica, again and watching her character develop as her grasp of the language improves and she finds her own unique place in Pompeii society. It was good to see that Amara at least has one loyal and protective friend!

Meanwhile, we’re drawing ever closer to the eruption of Vesuvius, of which the characters are still blissfully unaware although the reader has been anticipating it from the beginning. The final book in the trilogy, The Temple of Fortuna, is out in November and I’m looking forward to finding out how Amara’s story ends.

This is book 12/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2023

This is book 33/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy The Wolf Den as much as I did. A book about prostitutes in a Pompeii brothel didn’t sound very appealing to me, particularly as Ancient Rome has never been one of my favourite settings for historical fiction, yet it has turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read from my 20 Books of Summer list this year. Once I got into the story I found it difficult to put down and am looking forward to reading the second book (this is the first in a planned trilogy).

Set in 74 AD, just a few years before Pompeii will be destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, this is the story of Amara, the daughter of a doctor from the Greek town of Aphidnai, who is sold into slavery after her father’s death. Following a series of misfortunes she has ended up at the notorious Wolf Den brothel owned by the moneylender Felix. Amara and her fellow She-Wolves are treated as commodities, existing only to give pleasure to their clients and to make money for Felix. The women have lost not only their freedom but also their identities and even their original names. It’s a miserable life, but Amara finds some comfort in the friendships she has formed with the other prostitutes.

The women working at the Wolf Den come from a diverse range of backgrounds – from Greece, from Carthage or from Egypt, abandoned at birth, taken captive by slave traders or, like Amara, sold off by their own families. There are just five of them at the beginning of the book – Amara, Victoria, Dido, Cressa and Beronice – although more will arrive later as Felix continues to make ‘investments’ in his business. Each of the five, despite some clients seeing them as interchangeable, has her own distinctive personality and her own way of coping with the situation she has found herself in. Not all of the women can remember life before the brothel, but Amara can and she’s determined to regain her freedom.

This is the first book I’ve read set in Pompeii (I do have a copy of Robert Harris’ Pompeii somewhere, which I’ll get round to eventually) and I loved following Amara around the bustling, vibrant city, going into the shops, taverns and bathhouses, taking part in the Vinalia festivities and watching the gladiators in the amphitheatre. We also see inside the beautiful villas owned by Pompeii’s rich and powerful when Amara and Dido are booked to entertain at private parties and get a glimpse of the lives that could have been theirs under different circumstances. Although most of the characters in the book are fictional, the Roman author, naturalist and military leader Pliny the Elder makes an appearance and has an important role to play in the plot. Finally, real pieces of graffiti found in the ruins of Pompeii are used in the chapter headings, adding some further historical authenticity to the story.

The Wolf Den is not always an easy book to read; the nature of the story means there are some quite graphic descriptions of both the women’s work within the brothel and the violence they are often subjected to by the men who pay for their services. Elodie Harper doesn’t shy away from having bad things happen to her characters, but there’s some warmth and humour in the novel too, as well as the beginnings of a romance between Amara and another slave. I can’t wait to read The House with the Golden Door to see how the story continues.

This is book 17/20 from my 20 Books of Summer list.