The Vines Wild Shoot

She was banished for her mind. In exile, she discovered a power that could shatter empires.

Babylon, 1180 BCE. Inanna is a merchant's daughter with a brilliant, ungovernable mind, a gift that makes her a dangerous burden. Sold into service at the great temple of Hattusa, her rebellious intellect proves too much even for the strictest priests. As punishment, she is cast out to a decaying temple in the remote marshes, tasked with a scribe's lonely, meaningless duty: recording the merger tithes of fishermen.

Her exile is meant to be her end. A slow drowning in silence and mud.

But in the temple's collapsed archives, Inanna finds scrolls older than the Hittite Empire itself. They contain a forbidden recipe, a "bringing-forth of the god's thunder." Driven by loneliness and a scholar's obsession, she pieces together the cryptic instructions. Using the marsh's humble materials, salt from dung-heaps, sulphur from hot springs, charcoal from lightning-struck trees, she begins to experiment.

What she unlocks is not magic. It is ‘science’. And it is the most devastating force the ancient world has ever known.

Now, the very powers that sought to erase her will stop at nothing to control her discovery. From the sun-baked streets of Babylon to the towering stone halls of Hattusa, Inanna must navigate a world of ruthless priests, imperial politics, and encroaching raiders, armed only with her wits and a secret that can turn dust into thunder.

The Vine's Wild Shoot is the explosive first instalment in the ‘Tablet of Empire’ series, perfect for readers of ‘The Wolf Den’, ‘The Song of Achilles’, and ‘The Tenth Gift’. This is historical fiction that reimagines the birth of a world-altering technology in the hands of a forgotten young woman, where the greatest threat to an empire isn't an army, but a single, brilliant outcast.