Seventeen-year-old Thekla needs her quick wits and knife to track down her betrothed, a soldier who has left her at the altar for the third time. Elias the monk travels with her to Constantinople where she meets Irini of Athens, an extraordinarily beautiful orphan who has been brought by powerful Emperor Constantine to marry his son, Co-Emperor Leon. The two women join forces to survive this vigorous, glittering capital of the Roman Empire of the East, rocked by division and strife. But will Thekla help the ambitious and ruthless Irini of Athens find the power that she craves?  

‍

The Empress Irini Series is a coming of age, four-part YA series set in the Roman Empire of the East - brimming with fear, intrigue and violence. In this series, Janet McGiffin presents us with a world in which banal realities like hunger and survival sit cheek by jowl with the fantastical worlds of Medieval Christianity and Greek Mythology: Fates, curses, miracles and the ghosts of bygone patriarchs. Our central character, Thekla, a seventeen year old on the run in Constantinople, must rely solely upon her own courage and quick wits to survive this vigorous, glittering capital of the East.