Sir Henry Rider Haggard was an English writer of adventure novels set mostly in Africa, and a founder of the Lost World literary genre. Queen of the Dawn is set in Egypt one thousand eight hundred years before the time of Christ in the time of the Shepherd King Apepi. It opens at an almost breakneck pace, with Pharaoh deposed and killed, his wife and child in hiding, and the goddesses stirring. A secret religious order raises the Pharaoh's daughter, and she meets and falls in love with the usurper's disguised son.