Complete and unabridged, with 57 full-page plates by Hubert Robert, Thomas Cole and Edvard Munch. Rome, 408: Alaric's Goths are outside the walls, the city is starving, and inside are a fanatic, his daughter, and a pagan priest who has waited his whole life for exactly this. Collins wrote this at twenty-six, before The Woman in White and before he invented the detective novel; it is his first published novel, wildly overwritten, and the siege — the famine, the hidden food, the woman in the Gothic camp — is genuinely powerful. Fifty-seven plates of ruin, siege, and aftermath by painters from Bellotto to Munch, gathered here to match the novel's long view of Rome falling.