Syracuse Will Burn, by Jim Loughran | Book Review

Ancient Sicily is, in large part, criminally underused in historical fiction. Everyone wants to write about the fall of Troy or Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but Syracuse rarely gets a mention outside academic texts. That gap is exactly what Irish writer Jim Loughran is aiming to fill with Syracuse Will Burn, published in July 2026 by Sharpe Books as the first entry in a planned trilogy. This is undoubtedly his most ambitious project yet.

The book is set in 407 BC and centers on Timon, a miller’s son who, at thirteen, had a vision warning Syracuse of an incoming Athenian naval attack. The warning turned out to be true and saved the city, earning him a reputation as “the boy who heard the voice of the god.” Six years on, Timon is nineteen and still paying for that reputation, stuck reporting weekly to Artemisia, the city’s High Priestess, who treats his visions as a resource to be mined and controlled rather than a burden he actually carries. Meanwhile, the external threat has only grown: Carthage’s general Hannibal Mago is sweeping through Sicily, razing Greek cities like Himera and slaughtering their populations, with Syracuse next in his path.

Internally, things are just as unstable. The general Hermocrates, who once saved the city, has been exiled by the democratic assembly on suspicion of wanting to seize tyrannical power. When he’s murdered under suspicious circumstances, the resulting power vacuum sets off a vicious contest between the ambitious Dionysius and the more reluctant, world-weary Nicomedes. Timon, without ever really choosing to, ends up in the middle of all of it.

What impressed me most about Syracuse Will Burn is the research clearly put into the book, especially how the historical texture never feels bolted on. There’s a real specificity to the world-building that goes well beyond the usual dressing of togas and temples, such as the details of the autumn harvest and the economics behind Tyrian purple dye. None of it reads like research notes dumped into dialogue, which makes the book’s world feel inhabited rather than merely described. It really breathes life into the world in combination with the realistic dialogue.

I also came away having learned something about the real historical Athenian expedition against Syracuse and about Carthage’s brutal campaign of destruction across Sicilian cities. Having read Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon recently, another novel that draws on this same corner of Sicilian history, it was interesting to see two writers mine the same period for such different stories: Lennon’s is small, scrappy, and darkly comic, told from street level by two ordinary Syracusans, while Loughran’s is a bit bigger, more sweeping political epic, told from inside the palaces and temples rather than outside them. Reading them back to back, you get almost a full picture of the city from top to bottom.

The supporting cast holds up its end well too. Nicomedes in particular is a nice surprise: a war hero who could easily have been written as a straightforward foil to Dionysius, but who turns out to have no real interest in ruling at all, which makes his scenes with Timon some of the funnier and human moments in the book. Leon, Timon’s one real friend outside the world of temples and generals, serves a similar purpose, keeping the book tethered to ordinary life even as the plot around him gets more and more tangled up in palace intrigue.

Timon is the novel’s protagonist, and luckily he’s written as a very well-rounded character who most people will be able to relate to. He’s anxious, sardonic with his one real friend Leon, and constantly calculating exactly how much and what he should say. The third-person POV writing style works well, providing great insight into his thoughts.

As he walked around the city, Timon could not shake off a feeling of unease. He was missing something. All afternoon, images of the faces had been going round in his head. Hermocrates, the High Priestess, Nicomedes, Evander, Heracleides, Dionysius, Philistus. They kept swirling around without forming any recognisable pattern. 

Structurally, the novel is working several threads simultaneously: the external, existential pressure of Carthage’s advance; the internal fight over who leads Syracuse; and, running beneath both, the slow-burn mystery of who really wanted Hermocrates dead and why. For the most part these threads are woven together well, which is what will keep readers reading later into the evening than they’d planned.

For some people, there may be a couple very minor rough patches. The council and assembly scenes, while well-researched, move fast enough that if you’re not already comfortable with how Greek assembly politics functioned, it’s easy to lose track of exactly who’s aligned with whom and why a given vote matters. Maybe a character list or glossary would help. There’s also a romantic subplot that debateably arrives fairly abruptly compared to the slower build-up given to the political scheming, though given this is apparently only the first of three planned books, there’s surely room for those threads to be developed with more patience later. I do appreciate the reading list given at the end.

None of that seriously undercuts what Loughran has very competently written here, though. This is a book that trusts its readers to sit with political complexity rather than simplifying it, and trusts them to keep track of a fairly large cast without constantly stopping to hold their hand. By the time the conspiracy around Hermocrates’ death starts to unravel, the book has earned the right to ask you to care not just about who did it, but why. For a first entry in a trilogy, it does the hardest things right.

Final verdict: For fans of Gates of Fire, The Song of Achilles, and Robert Harris’s Roman novels, or the recent film The Odyssey, Syracuse Will Burn by Jim Loughran is a strong, confidently researched opening to what looks like an ambitious historical trilogy.

You can get your copy of Syracuse Will Burn or read for free on Kindle Unlimited here!