How to find a book without knowing the author or tiel

[kestrell]

My favorite book that I read as a kid and have no idea of the title or author?
It was about a teenage Roman girl who had just turned the age that made her eligible for mariage, and she ends up on a ship which is taken over by pirates. She's attracted to the pirate captain (of course), but also a young Roman soldier. The captain is ultimately vanguished but the soldier tells him "All roads lead to Rome," and the captain takes the hint and commits honorable suicide by throwing himself into the sea.
Here is the link to the how to
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-find-a-book-without-knowing-the-title-or-author/

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Wish I had an answer for you -- that's a helpful article!

One search tool that's missing is contacting a librarian or bookseller -- not only do they have heaps of book-knowledge, they also have a lot of experience in answering these questions.

[melita66]

I was going to suggest the Literature stack exchange site. Does it have any fantasy aspects? If so, it could go on the Science Fiction and Fantasy stack exchange site. You tag the question with story-identification (there or at Literature) and include as much as you can, like approximately when you read it, character names, plot, etc.

Both Literature and SciFi have guidance for posting a story-identification question which may be useful on any site:

https://literature.stackexchange.com/tags/story-identification/info

https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9335/how-to-ask-a-good-story-id-question

If you don't want to sign up for yet-another-website, I'm a member/user on SciFi and could easily become one on Literature. If you'd like me to post a question there, I'd be happy to, if you can run through one or the other guidelines to see if you can remember any other details.

[kestrell]

Oo, thank you for the information and the link!
Sadly, I don't think this book had any fantasy aspects: it was more like Rosemary Sutcliff or Mary Renault historical fiction.