Their city was a god. His ambition was greater.
In the fourth century BC, the island fortress of Tyre stands as the unassailable master of the sea. Its wealth is legendary, its fleet is unmatched, and its walls are a monument to a thousand years of defiant pride. At the heart of the city is the temple of Melqart, the city's god-king, whose divine protection has made Tyre a rock against which every great empire has broken. But a new, more terrible force is now sweeping through the world: a young Macedonian king named Alexander, whose ambition is as boundless as the heavens and whose army has never known defeat.
When Alexander makes a blasphemous demand that would mean the surrender of their city's very soul, Tyre chooses to fight. Their decision initiates one of the most dramatic and brutal sieges in history, a seven-month struggle that pits three unforgettable individuals against the judgment of a god and the will of a conqueror:
Tanit-Elissa, the devout high priestess of Melqart, whose absolute faith becomes the spiritual bedrock of the city's defiance, forcing her to confront the terrible price of her god's silence.
Kallias of Pella, a brilliant, arrogant Macedonian engineer, tasked by Alexander with an impossible, world-altering feat: to build a great causeway across the sea, a road of vengeance that will test the very limits of his genius and force him to reckon with the horrific human cost of his creations.
Lykos the Thracian, a cynical, battle-hardened veteran of the Macedonian phalanx, who fights not for glory or for kings, but for the men beside him, and who must endure the brutal, grinding reality of a war that transforms soldiers into a merciless instrument of annihilation.
From the spectacular, desperate ingenuity of the Tyrian fireship to the cold, methodical horror of the final assault, The Mole and the Rock is an epic, visceral, and deeply human historical saga. It is a story of the clash of empires, the fracturing of faith, and the terrible, enduring consequences of a war fought between a city that believed it was eternal and a man who believed he was a god.
