The Borderlands Books in Order

The Borderlands is Damion Hunter's Roman Britain series about Faustus Valerianus, a young man born between two worlds. In Shadow of the Eagle, he is the son of a Roman father and a British mother, and that split heritage shapes everything that follows. After both parents die, he sells the family farm and joins Agricola's campaign in the north, stepping straight into the hardest question the series asks, what does loyalty mean when your blood and your duty pull in different directions?

That divided identity is the engine of the whole story.

Faustus belongs to Rome by training, language, and military service, but Britain never stops claiming him. The books keep him close to the frontier, where conquest is not a clean line on a map but a daily pressure of forts, marches, bad weather, suspicion, and local resistance. Rome wants order. The land keeps answering back with memory, kinship, and beliefs older than the empire.

Setting matters a lot here. These are novels of roads, camps, mountain passes, wet fields, rough seas, and half-finished strongholds at the edge of Roman control. Hunter uses Britain not just as scenery but as a force that shapes choices. Distance slows news, weather ruins plans, and local alliances can matter as much as discipline. The result is military fiction that feels lived in, rather than polished into parade-ground heroics.

There is also a haunted quality running through the series. Faustus is shadowed by his father's memory, and sometimes by something that feels closer and stranger than memory. At the same time, his mother's roots draw him toward the stories and spiritual world of Britain. Hunter never lets the books tip fully into fantasy, but she does leave room for folklore, omens, and the sense that people in the first century understood the world very differently from modern readers.

That gives the books their uneasy, misty edge.

As the series grows, the map widens and the politics get more tangled, but the focus stays personal. Faustus is not trying to change the empire single-handedly. He is trying to survive it, serve within it, and figure out who he is inside it. If you like Roman historical fiction with strong atmosphere, close attention to place, and a hero whose biggest struggle is as much inward as military, The Borderlands is a very good place to start.