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Time travel has been a fiction staple since Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. A standard trope has a person from the future taking modern knowledge into the past.
The Physician of Nineveh: A Time Travel Historical Fantasy of Ancient Mesopotamia, Forbidden Magic, and Love Across Time, the newest novel by Glenn Cooper, turns this upside down. Here a time traveler from the past goes to the future in search of badly needed information.
Mannu-ki-Ashur is Chief Physician to King Ashurbanipal in 7th-century Assyria. The king’s favorite concubine, a woman Mannu has loved from afar since childhood, is dying of an infection. He cannot cure her. He chooses to take a terrible chance. He uses forbidden magic, spells to take him to some point in the future where he can learn how to cure the woman and then return him to Nineveh.
The spell takes him to the 21st century. He arrives without clothes or any artifacts in the middle of downtown London. It is a place filled with strange monsters and people he is unable to communicate with. Streaking through London he is tazed, arrested and taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
Dr. Kate Mayne, a brilliant Assyriologist, works at University College London. She is recovering from a broken love affair. A friend, a hospital nurse, sends Kate a cell phone photo of clay markings a lunatic streaker hospitalized there has made. Kate recognizes them as Assyrian cuneiform. She goes to the hospital to confront the fraud.
Mannu convinces Kate he is the real thing, a time traveler from the Ancient Assyria Kate studies. Intrigued and attracted, she joins his quest to find a cure. But there is a complication. Ashurbanipal’s chief eunuch wants the concubine dead.
Learning what Mannu has done, he sends two agents after Mannu, using the same forbidden magic. They are tasked with tracking him down and killing him. They arrive in the same condition as Mannu, but have a different reception. They are soon tracking him down using Assyrian rules of engagement.
The Physician of Nineveh offers fast-paced action mixed with light humor in both ancient and modern times. Kate and Mannu find mutual attraction and common foes – again, from both ancient and modern times. Cooper skillfully blends history, science, and magic to create a consistent story, contrasting modern and ancient values and ethics. The result is a delightfully entertaining tale.
“The Physician of Nineveh: A Time Travel Historical Fantasy of Ancient Mesopotamia, Forbidden Magic, and Love Across Time,” by Glenn Cooper, Lascaux Media, 2025, 312 pages, $16.99 (Paperback), $5.99 (Ebook)
This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.
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