In the late August in the year of AD 79, the inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum are going about their normal business in the late summer heat. Two of them have a room share arrangement: Nonius, scrounger, thief and failed pimp works by night and sleeps by day; Larius, the fresco painter with dreams of artistic greatness, does the opposite.

Just after midday the top of the great volcano, Vesuvius, disappears in a vast ash cloud, and their lives will change forever. While one sets about looting rapidly emptying homes, the other desperately tries to save his family from destruction.

Lindsey Davis brings alive one the greatest catastrophes in human history in this gripping novella, poignantly evoking the struggle for life in the cities at the base of the volcano.