A New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Jerwood Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named a Book of the Year by the Telegraph, Spectator, Observer, and BBC History Magazine, this bold new history of the rise of Christianity shows how its radical followers helped to annihilate Greek and Roman civilizations.

In Harran, the locals refused to convert. They were dismembered, their limbs hung along the town’s main street. In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from her chariot and flayed her to death with shards of broken pottery. Not long before, their brethren had invaded the city’s greatest temple and razed it—smashing its world-famous statues and destroying all that was left of Alexandria’s Great Library.
Today we refer to Christianity’s conquest of the West as a "triumph." In truth, it was an orgy of destruction that helped to extinguish vast swaths of classical culture and pitch Western civilization into a thousand-year-long decline. In The Darkening Age, Catherine Nixey resurrects this lost history, offering a wrenching account of the rise of Christianity and its terrible cost.