Sarah Dunant
publisher
Random House
format
hard cover
pages
432
Per Petterson
Mrs. Somebody, Somebody
Tracy Winn
With Violets
Elizabeth Robards
Bill Warrington's Last Stand
James King
The year is 1570, and in the convent of Santa Caterina, in the Italian
city of Ferrara, noblewomen find space to pursue their lives under
God’s protection. But any community, however smoothly run, suffers
tremors when it takes in someone by force. And the arrival of Santa
Caterina’s new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core.
Ripped
by her family from an illicit love affair, sixteen-year-old Serafina is
willful, emotional, sharp, and defiant–young enough to have a life to
look forward to and old enough to know when that life is being cut
short. Her first night inside the walls is spent in an incandescent
rage so violent that the dispensary mistress, Suora Zuana, is
dispatched to the girl’s cell to sedate her. Thus begins a complex
relationship of trust and betrayal between the young rebel and the
clever, scholarly nun, for whom the girl becomes the daughter she will
never have.
As Serafina rails against her incarceration, others
are drawn into the drama: the ancient, mysterious Suora Magdalena–with
her history of visions and ecstasies–locked in her cell; the
ferociously devout novice mistress Suora Umiliana, who comes to see in
the postulant a way to extend her influence; and, watching it all, the
abbess, Madonna Chiara, a woman as fluent in politics as she is in
prayer. As disorder and rebellion mount, it is the abbess’s job to keep
the convent stable while, outside its walls, the dictates of the
Counter-Reformation begin to purge the Catholic Church and impose on
the nunneries a regime of terrible oppression.
Sarah Dunant, the bestselling author of The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, brings this intricate Renaissance world compellingly to life. Amid Sacred Hearts
is a rich, engrossing, multifaceted love story, encompassing the
passions of the flesh, the exultation of the spirit, and the deep,
enduring power of friendship.
Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant was born in 1950, and was
educated at Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, London, before reading
History at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked as an actress and began
working as a producer for BBC Radio in 1974. A former presenter of both Radio
4's 'Woman's Hour' and BBC Television's 'The Late Show' which included, until
1997, the annual broadcast of the Booker Prize for Fiction ceremony, she is the
author of eight novels. She is the creator of private investigator Hannah Wolfe,
featured in Birth Marks (1991), Fatlands (1993), winner of a Crime
Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, and Under My Skin
(1995). She is a patron of the Orange Prize for Fiction and reviews for various
newspapers and magazines including The Times and The Observer, and
is a regular presenter of BBC Radio 3's 'Night Waves'.
To date she has written nine novels, including the New York Times bestseller
The Birth of Venus, and edited two books of essays. She has two children and lives in London and Florence.
Beyond the book