Sparrow tells the story of Jacob, last survivor of an abandoned British Roman town. Raised in a brothel on the Spanish coast in the waning years of the Roman Empire, a boy of no known origin creates his own identity. Sparrow recreates a lost world of the last of old pagan Rome as its codes and morals give way before the new religion of Christianity, and introduces readers to one of the most powerfully affecting and memorable characters of recent fiction. A novel of ancient times for our times.