(It was also a good choice for reading over a cocktail in the Writers’ Bar at Raffles Hotel in Singapore.) Of the others, I thought The Birth of Venus a better book than In the Company of the Courtesan Sacred Hearts has a few flat spots here and there as well, but was a good choice for an airport novel when jet lag and interrupted reading makes anything too challenging problematic. While still sufficiently well-written to intrigue, they’re more straightforward than Mapping the Edge and make me suspect that Dunant and/or her editors are these days aiming more for the popular fiction market than literary fiction. Sacred Hearts is the third of a trilogy of historical novels set in the Italian Renaissance. Its ambiguities and complex narrative lines set the writing apart from the usual ‘women’s fiction’ and I liked it very much. The first of her books that I read was Mapping the Edge, a dark psychological thriller about a woman who disappears while on a short break to Italy. Sarah Dunant is an English author who writes novels that explore ‘women’s issues’ in narratives that play around with time and space.
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