![]() ![]() The central character is Alessandra, the fifteen year-old daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant. ![]() ![]() You can almost smell the streets wafting from the pages! Dunant is a meticulous researcher and the novel feels very authentic. The novel is set in Renaissance Florence the sense of time and place is profound. It’s wonderful, I loved it, and it seems to have gone down pretty well with the other participants on the Reading Challenge. I decided on this as a theme for my Facebook Reading Challenge 2018, and when I saw The Birth of Venus in my local Oxfam bookshop it seemed an obvious choice. ![]() I’ve read a few historical novels, notably Deborah Moggach and Tracy Chevalier, and loved them, though it’s not a genre I often choose. (I should add that 2000-2012 were lean reading years for me – I was knee-deep in children and totally out of the literary loop). I was conscious that she seemed to disappear off the scene and for a while there I got her mixed up with Sarah Waters…until I saw Sarah W speak at the Manchester Literature Festival a few years ago and realised they were not the same! But Sarah D had in fact reinvented herself as an author, as I was to discover a year or so ago when I saw her speak at a writer’s conference. It’s funny how you remember some people – she always had very distinctive glasses. I first knew Sarah Dunant as a broadcaster on late-night arts shows in the late 1990s. ![]()
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