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Books for young readers set in Roman Britain saw a 'particular flourishing' in the 1950s, with the works of Rosemary Sutcliff, Geoffrey Trease and Henry Treece (Butler and O'Donovan 2012: 18). More recently, the past twenty years have seen a resurgence of British adult and children's books set in the Roman world (often, but not always, early imperial Roman Britain). These books may either situate the narrative entirely within a Roman Britain as we imagine it or, in the guise of what Karen Hellekson calls 'true alternate history', years after a 'nexus event' in a world radically changed from the one we know (Hellekson 2000: 253). An example of the former is Caroline Lawrence's children's Roman Mysteries series (2002-12), which is set entirely within the Empire of the first century CE, and her follow-up series, Roman Quests (2016-8), which focuses on Roman Britain in the same era. By contrast, Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy (2005-11) is set in a twenty-first century world in which the Roman Empire has outlasted its historical counterpart. A further variant involves those narratives which use a protagonist from our own world and time (generally speaking, for young readers, a modern British teenager) who visits the Roman world and provides a directly comparative perspective on what they encounter there. This may be achieved either by time travel or by what Hellekson terms the 'parallel worlds story' (Hellekson 2000: 254). The parallel worlds narrative operates on the allohistorical assumption that history can change at any point, and that any change, no matter how insignificant, can result in substantial later changes to timelines. It posits, however, the existence of every possible outcome of every event, in an infinite set of parallel worlds existing simultaneously in one timeline or another, with characters able to travel between these parallel existences. The time travel narrative is exemplified in Lawrence's Time Travel Diaries (2019-20) and Julia Jarman's Time Travelling Cat series (1992-2010), which both allow the teenage protagonist to travel back to Roman Britain. N.M. Browne's Warriors of Alavna (2000) is an example of the parallel worlds story; the two protagonists are transported into an alternate Roman Britain, where they save the native Britons from the murderous Roman Ravens by bringing the Ninth Legion from our timeline into...