The Birth of Venus

Alessandra Cecci is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the walls of the family chapel in their Florentine palazzo. Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter's abilities. As Medici Florence is threatened by the hellfire of the monk Savonarola, the painter and his dazzling art exert and ever more powerful and erotic pull.

'This moving, gripping and impressive work is Dunant's most beautifully achieved novel . . . Working artistic motifs and subject matter into a compelling narrative, she weaves the big themes of love, sex, death and art into the everyday'
Sunday Times

'Dunant has created a vivid and compellingly believable picture of Renaissance Florence: the squalor and brutality; the confidence and vitality; the political machinations . . . Magnificent'
Daily Telegraph

'Simply amazing, so brilliantly written . . . almost intolerably exciting at times, and at others, equally poignant'
Antonia Fraser