Liber Perditorum: or, The Book of Lost

In 1968, seventy-six impossible books are unearthed beneath Pompeii. Bound in leather, stitched with silver thread, and marked with the seal of the Library of Alexandria, they should not have survived-and perhaps should never have existed. Professor Matteo Dericci, a brilliant and controversial linguist, is given the task to translate one of them. The recovered text carries him into ancient Alexandria, where the dying Ptolemy Soter commands the creation of the greatest library in history. His heir, Philadelphus, inherits a city alive with rumor, a priesthood that has surrendered sight and hearing, and a stranger who calls himself Prometheus: witness of creation, prisoner of the gods, and preacher of a truth humanity was never meant to hear. But the deeper Dericci reads, the less the manuscript resembles an ordinary relic. History folds into myth. Prophecy begins to resemble memory. Sacred tradition, political invention, and ancient fantasy become impossible to separate. What if humanity's oldest stories are not inventions-but damaged translations of something real? Liber Perditorum is a layered literary mystery blending historical fantasy, mythology, theological speculation, and the intellectual intrigue of a recovered archive. Myth? Sacred text? Ancient fantasy fiction? Perhaps all three.