A story of defiance. A legacy of survival. A queen who refused to kneel.

In the early 17th century, the relentless machine of the Portuguese Empire is devouring the African interior, fueled by the brutal demands of the slave trade and a messianic certainty of its own superiority. But on the shores of Ndongo, one woman stands in the doorway of what the colonizers call the "Gate of Hell," and she refuses to let them pass.

Princess Njinga is a woman born into a tradition that never anticipated her. When her brother, the King, falls ill and the Portuguese move to install a puppet on the throne, Njinga must transform from a diplomat into a monarch. In a world of rigid European rectangles, she thinks in the fluid, adaptive mathematics of the land itself.

From the famous negotiation chambers where she forces a governor to meet her as an equal to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Ngoleme valley , Njinga plays a high-stakes chess game against an empire. To save her people, she will forge an impossible alliance with the fierce Imbangala warriors , accept a tactical baptism into a faith she does not believe , and eventually conquer the neighboring kingdom of Matamba to build a new bastion of resistance.

Spanning four decades of guerrilla warfare, political intrigue, and personal sacrifice, Throne of Lions explores the heavy cost of power and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood. It is the story of a ruler who carried the dead with her, paid for every victory with pieces of her soul, and outlasted every enemy who dared to underestimate her.

Robert Walker delivers a pulse-pounding historical thriller based on the true life of Njinga Mbande—the warrior queen who defied the Portuguese for forty years and died in her own bed at eighty, never conquered.

"They mistook a tactical concession for surrender. Their mistake."