Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53702 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Birth of Venus is all the more fascinating a historical novel for the author's inability to make up her mind what it is about. Is it a novel about the limited choices available to a woman with talent in Renaissance Florence--marriage or the convent? Or is it a novel about the choices you make to survive in a totalitarian society? As Savonarola takes Florence closer and closer to being an ascetic theocracy, Alessandra, her gay brother and his lover whom she has married for mutual protection find themselves in more and more peril. It could also be a detective story--Allesandra is in love with a painter whose religious mania and fascination with the body makes him a plausible suspect for a series of killings and dismemberments. Some historical novels wear their research too heavily--Dunant's is light, fluent and pacy, but her fascination with the possibilities revealed by research leaves her failing to make choices.

The Birth of Venus is a highly intelligent novel kept from incoherence mostly by the intensely imagined Alessandra, through whose eyes we see the tragic end of a key moment in human culture and whose lively sensibility constantly sparks ideas about art and her time. --Roz Kaveney

The Independent
'Dunant throws out ideas about sex, art and the divine with Renaissance-style sprezzatura '

TIMES
'No one should visit Tuscany this summer without this book. It is richly textured, and driven by a thrillerish fever'

Customer Reviews

Really engrossing, magical book
A brilliantly crafted novel. Kept me in suspense until the end. Whetted my apetite for Renaissance art while keeping me intrigued by a juicy plot. The main character, Alessandra, was so easy to fall in love with and I could hardly bear to put it down. Definitely 10 out of 10 - 15th Century Florence just leapt off the page!

A beautiful, seductive novel
The Birth of Venus is a fantastic historical novel by the acclaimed author, Sarah Dunant. Dunant expertly paints a vivid and compelling picture of Renaissance Florence in a time of religious and political turbulence. In the midst of this turmoil, Alessandra Cecchi is experiencing her own turbulent transitional period into a beautiful young lady with very real feelings of love, passion and intoxicating attraction. From the moment I was introduced to her character I immediately empathised with her, understood her as a person and felt all her emotions from her innate awkwardness and shyness to the seductive, erotic pull that she feels for the forbidden painter. I took pleasure in watching her develop into a confident, independent lady as the novel unraveled. The novel is as full of twists and turns as the squalid streets of Renaissance Florence, and weaves together to form a fantastic, exciting and at times, poignant novel.
I would recommend this novel, and others by Sarah Dunant, to anyone with even a vague interest in historical fiction.

What a lovely book!
I was given this book as a present and was hooked from page one. Set in Florence during the Reinassance, it is a very believable picture of life back then, described in such vivid, well researched detail. The story itself is mysterious, gripping and moving. Definitely worth reading if you like historical fiction and even if you don't! A page-turner.