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In three volumes, The Course of Fortune —A Novel of the Great Siege of Malta, follows the adventures of a young Spanish soldier-of-fortune Francisco de Barai over the course of fifteen of the most turbulent years in the most turbulent century in history, adventures that climax in the Great Siege of Malta of 1565. During that most momentous of all sieges, tens of thousands of Turks descend on the island, defended by some 600 Knights of Malta and another few thousand mercenaries and Maltese civilians. The horrific and heroic events are recounted with the utmost attention to historical accuracy, just as the entire escalating chain of events is played out against a finely researched tapestry of Renaissance values, superstitions and culture. Tony Rothman is a physicist and writer. He received a B.A. in physics from Swarthmore College in 1975, and a Ph.D. from the Center for Relativity at the University of Texas, Austin in 1981. After leaving Texas, he did post-doctoral work at Oxford, Moscow and Cape Town. Rothman’s scientific research has been in cosmology, the study of the early universe, and he has authored approximately sixty scientific papers on that subject. He has taught physics at Princeton, Harvard and elsewhere. Apart from his scientific work, Rothman is the author of eleven books, both fiction and nonfiction. The most recent is Firebird, a scientific suspense novel concerning a race for nuclear fusion (Wildside Press, 2015). He has also authored seven plays, contributes to a number of national magazines, including Scientific American and Discover, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.