The Heretic Queen

The Heretic Queen is a historical novel by the American writer Michelle Moran, published in 2008. It is set in ancient Egypt and follows Nefertari, the niece of the former queen Nefertiti.

The novel opens in Thebes, where a palace fire has killed the royal family of the Eighteenth Dynasty, leaving Nefertari as a survivor whose relatives have been branded heretical, so that nobody in Egypt will speak their names. She is treated as a relic of a previous reign, an unimportant princess left to run wild in the palace. This changes when the Pharaoh's aunt takes her under her wing and she is brought to the Temple of Hathor to be educated in the manner of a future queen. She then catches the eye of the crown prince, and despite her family's history the two of them fall in love and want to marry, against the wishes of much of Egypt, which opposes a union between the rising star of a new dynasty and the fading star of an old and heretical one. She becomes the wife of Ramesses the Great.

Moran writes historical novels set in ancient Egypt, and this one is built around a queen for whom her own family history is a political liability.