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Random House
February 2004
On Sale: February 17, 2004
ISBN: 0812968972
EAN: 9780812968972
Kindle: B000FC2N7G
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous
cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to
decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of
the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing,
Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s
parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile,
Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression
imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing
religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught
between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling
art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s
reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop,
Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom
it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and
his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one
of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive
the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a
compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through
the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of
spirit as her beloved city.
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