Sarah Dunant

In the Name of the Family - as Blood and Beauty did before - holds up a mirror to a turbulent moment of history, sweeping aside the myths to bring alive the real Borgia family....

Alessandra must make crucial decisions about the shape of her adult life, as Florence itself must choose....

Rodrigo Borgia picks up his papal skirts and walks out on to the public balcony....

While the Papal city of Rome burns, two of her most interesting and wily citizens slip away....

Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice....

Rom, im August 1492. Schon am frühen Morgen ächzt die Stadt unter der Gluthitze des Sommers. Der Lärm in der engen Gasse lässt Lucrezia...

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls....

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls....

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....

My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment....