Press Reviews

• Antonia Fraser

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

• Simon Schama

  A beautiful serpent of a novel, seductive and dangerous . . . full of wise guile, the most brilliant novel yet from a writer of powerful historical imagination and wicked literary gifts. Dunant's snaky tale of art, sex and Florentine hysteria consumes utterly-but the experience is all pleasure

• Amanda Foreman

  Sarah Dunant has given us a story of sacrifice and betrayal, set during Florence's captivity under the fanatic Savonarola. She writes like a painter, and thinks like a philosopher: juxtapositioning the humane against the animal, hope against fanaticism, creativity against destruction. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force of storytelling

• Telegraph

  Dunant has created a vivid and compellingly believable picture of Renaissance Florence: the squalor and brutality; the confidence and vitality; the political machinations. Her research has obviously been meticulous . . . A magnificent novel

• Independent

  It's to Dunant's credit that the vast quantities of historical information in this book are deployed so naturally and lightly . . . On the simplest level, this is an erotic and gripping thriller, but its intellectual excitement also comes from the way Dunant makes the art and philosophy of the period look new and dangerous again . . . Theology has rarely looked so sexy

• The Times

  Dunant is in her historical element in Renaissance Florence . . . No one should visit Tuscany this summer without this book. It is richly textured and driven by a thrillerish fever

• Sunday Times

  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

• Financial Times

  [Dunant's] control, pace, and instinct are well-nigh impeccable