I highly recommend The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper. I started reading it with no expectations and was pleasantly surprised by how much I ended up enjoying it.

The Wolf Den is set in Pompeii in 74 CE and is about a young Grecian woman called Amara who works at a brothel, known as a lupanar in Pompeii. Lupanar also means a “den of wolves”. When she lived in Greece, Amara was the daughter of a doctor who died, leaving Amara and her mother destitute. Amara’s mother ended up selling her as a concubine, but the wife of the man who bought her became jealous and sold Amara as a sex slave. Amara was brought to Pompeii and purchased by the brothel owner, Felix (sidebar: in case you are like me and had no clue where Pompeii is, it is located in south Italy).

What I appreciate about The Wolf Den is that it is close to being an honest portrayal of the life of a sex worker during the time in which it is set, but thankfully does not include any graphic depictions of sexual assault. Amara may work in a brothel, but it does not mean that she enjoys being a sex slave. It was a fate forced upon her by her own father’s lack of foresight to make sure his daughter was provided for when he died. Women had no agency over their own lives at this time (who am I kidding, women do not have much in the way of agency even now) and were commodities traded among men, whether they were respectable daughters given to their husbands by their fathers or sex workers being pimped out by their owners.

Amara is an intelligent woman who does not spend her time waiting for a man to come along and rescue her. Early on, she teaches herself to swallow the revulsion she feels each time she is forced to have sex and begins looking for ways to better the situation she is in and to outwit her vicious employer. She is not naïve enough to think that she will ever get out of the sex trade, but she would rather be one wealthy man’s concubine than a whore in a dirty brothel. Amara meets another slave that she falls in love with, but this is not a fairy tale where they run off together to live happily ever after. She knows she must make sacrifices if she wants to get away from the brothel and away from Felix.

But that is not to say that nothing good ever happens to Amara. She has her fellow “she-wolves” at the brothel who care for each other and help each other out as much as they can. They are a diverse group of women who each handle being a sex slave in their own way: Victoria, a native Pompeii woman who was abandoned as a baby, is charming and funny and theatrical in her interactions with customers; Beronice gets by on her love for one of Felix’s henchman, but is she naïve for thinking he loves her in return; beautiful Dido, who seems like she might break into pieces with every sexual encounter, but learns to cope with her situation with the help of her friend Amara; Britannica, who was kidnapped from her home in Britain, is a warrior who fights back every time a man forces himself on her and becomes protective of the other women in the brothel.

The Wolf Den is yet another story about how men use women, and it shows how little has changed for women since 74 CE; however, it is the relationships between the women in this novel, it is their cunning, their strength and their resilience, their ability to see the humour in most situations, that make it worth reading. The Wolf Den is the first in a planned trilogy set in Pompeii and thankfully the second novel comes out this September, so I do not have to wait long to find out what happens next for Amara and the other she-wolves.