About this item
She is called "The Perfect One," the most famous and beautiful woman in the ancient world. She rules with her husband Akhenaten over the most powerful, sophisticated and affluent society the world has ever seen and across an empire that stretches from Africa through the Middle East. But behind these glorious scenes an epic power struggle is taking place: Nefertiti and Akhenaten inaugurate an enlightened new religion and build a magnificent and mysterious new capital, Akhetaten, in which to worship the Sun God, the Aten. The delicate balance of power in Egypt is thrown into confusion. The priesthood is stripped of its traditional authority and wealth, the army is enraged by the growing turbulence in the empire, and the people resent the loss of their gods. Old alliances are brought into doubt, and generations of inherited power and wealth are suddenly at stake.And then, just days before the crucial festival to celebrate the new capital, Nefertiti suddenly vanishes. Rai Rahotep, the youngest chief detective in the Thebes division, with a rising reputation for his original methods, is secretly assigned by Akhenaten himself to investigate. He has ten days to find the Queen and return her in time for the celebrations. Success will bring glory - but if Rai fails, he and his family will die. . . .
About the Author
Nick Drake was born in 1961. He lives and works in London. His first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe Books, 1999) , was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999, and was selected for the Next Generation Poets promotion in 2004. From The Word Go was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. His most recent projects include a stage adaptation of Philippe Petit's To Reach the Cloud; the screenplay for the Australian film Romulus, My Father, starring Eric Bana, which won Best Film at the Australian Film Awards; Success, a play for the National Theatre's Connections project; and a trilogy of historical novels (Nefertiti, shortlisted for CWA Best Historical Crime Novel, Tutankhamun and Egypt: The Book of Chaos which Mammoth Screen are developing for TV) . He is a screenwriter, and is also working the composer Tansy Davies and director Deborah Warner on an opera for ENO. In September 2010 he was invited to join Cape Farewell's trip to the Arctic to explore climate change, and from that journey arose a commission from United Visual Artists to create poems and texts for their ground-breaking installation High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum (2011) . Those poems, together with others inspired by the Arctic and its voices, are gathered in his collection The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe Books, 2012) .
