Sarah Dunant is an award-winning thriller writer whose novels are set in Renaissance Italy. She explores women’s lives through the lenses of art, sex, and religion, uncovering their hidden worlds. Her incisive commentary on history and culture brings the past to life with compelling vividness and intellectual depth. Dunant offers a unique and accessible lens into a pivotal era of European history.
Sarah Dunant's sparkling novel, In the Name of the Family, is girded by a keen political intelligence and a stunning feel for Italy in the years around 1500 Lauro Martines, Emeritus Professor off European history at University of California and one of world's foremost authorities on the Italian Renaissance
After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan crosses the windswept Cornish moors to Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. There she finds Patience a changed woman, downtrodden by her domineering, vicious husband Joss Merlyn. The inn is a front for a lawless gang of criminals, and Mary is unwillingly dragged into their dangerous world of smuggling and murder. Before long she will be forced to cross her own moral line to save herself.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched only by its brutality and corruption. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy, he is defined not just by his wealth, charisma and power, but by his blood: a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If he is to succeed, he must use his Machiavellian son and innocent daughter. Stripping away the myths around the Borgias, Blood & Beauty breathes life into the astonishing family of Alexander VI and celebrates the raw power of history itself: compelling, complex, and relentless.
The BP Portrait Award, now in its nineteenth year, is a popular fixture on the summer calendar, and is the leading showcase for artists specializing in portraiture. The competition is open to all artists aged eighteen and over from around the world. The 2008 award received 1,600 entrants, all competing for the main prize of GBP25,000 and a possible commission.
Santa Catarina, a convent near Venice, is home to over one hundred women in 1567. But with powerful forces for change raging outside the convent, and with the world of the women within threatened by a new arrival, passions, hysteria, and conflict will come to threaten their very survival.
In July, 1553, sibling rivalry has never been more tumultuous than between the daughters of King Henry VIII. Queen Mary Tudor has just won possession of the throne, but her half-sister - the Princess Elizabeth - holds the hearts of the people. Knowing this, Mary banishes her to a country retreat, determined to keep her as far away from court life.
Set in Renaissance Italy, this follow-up to Dunant's "The Birth of Venus" recounts the fantastic escapades of Bucino Teodoldo, a wily dwarf, and his mistress, celebrated courtesan Fiammetta Bianchini, who escape to Venice where intrigue awaits.
Turning fifteen in Renaissance Florence, Alessandra Cecchi becomes intoxicated with the works of a young painter whom her father has brought to the city to decorate the family's Florentine palazzo
De mysterieuze verdwijning van een alleenstaande moeder leidt tot vele speculaties: is ze ontvoerd of heeft ze misschien een nieuwe vriend?
Anna packs her bags one day without telling anyone where and why she is going - just that she'll be back soon. Her thoughts, as she boards a plane, is that this journey will give her time to think about her life - as a woman hitting forty, a journalist and a single mother. She has no premonition that she will become a statistic in a missing person file. Left at home is Anna's beloved six year old daughter Lily, her gay friend Paul who is surrogate father to Lily, and her eccentric best friend Estella. When Anna doesn't return, they make uneasy excuses, until, as time passes, the mind-numbing possibility that Anna might not be coming back, becomes terrifyingly real. And while those closest to her battle with their imaginations, Anna is on a dark journey - in one scenario Anna is on a ravishing, sexual adventure, on the other, much darker voyage, she is the victim of a stranger's dangerous sexual fantasy. In a masterpiece of emotionally intelligent and nerve-wracking suspense, Sarah Dunant takes us to the very edge.
Terrifying, dark and bold, Sarah Dunant's breakthrough psychological thriller transcends genres and audiences; it crosses all boundaries, encroaching on the darker side of sex and fantasy, male and female. Elizabeth Skorvecky has just come out of a long-term relationship with her boyfriend. Alone in her Victorian house, her only companions are her cat, a trashy crime novel she's translating from Czech, and her music. As the summer ends and the days draw in, unsettling things begin to happen. First it's just a missing CD, then music playing in an empty kitchen at midnight, then a table laid for breakfast for two. Poltergeist? Insanity? When Elizabeth wakes at four in the morning to find a man sitting at the end of her bed, she knows, sickeningly , she's very sane - and being stalked. She also discovers that the means of surviving can be just as shocking as surrender.
The Political Correctness Debate
This work looks at the political correctness challenge to liberalism; how each generation redefines what is acceptable; what we mean by equality and how we go about achieving it. The topics explored range from date rape, the call for a new curriculum, to policing.
Privatdetektivin Hannah Wolfe ist gerade aus Hongkong nach London zurückgekehrt und ziemlich pleite. Da ihre Untermieterin in ihrer Abwesenheit ihre Wohnung verwüstet hat, muss sie ihren Ex-Boss Frank Comfort um einen Job bitten. Der schickt sie aufs Land zu der altjüngferlichen Ballettlehrerin Miss Patrick, die ihren Schützling Carolyn Hamilton vermisst. Carolyn war nach London gegangen, um als Tänzerin Karriere zu machen. Sie hatte Kontakt mit ihrer Lehrerin gehalten, doch dann blieben die monatlichen Postkarten plötzlich aus. Hannah hat Carolyns Spur gerade aufgenommen, da wird ihre hochschwangere Leiche aus der Themse gezogen. Eigentlich gibt es nun für Hannah keinen Grund mehr, sich weiter mit Carolyns Angelegenheiten zu befassen, aber ein anonymer Auftraggeber bezahlt sie dafür, weiterzuforschen.
Kriminalroman. Hannah Wolfe, kynisk og selvironisk privatdetektiv, tror ikke på selvmord, da en ung danserinde, som hun var hyret til at opspore, dukker op i Themsens mudrede vande, druknet og højgravid
