Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father a prosperous cloth merchant brings a young painter back from Northern Europe to decorate the walls of the family chapel in their Florentine Palazzo. A child of the renaissance with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter's abilities.
She is drawn into the life of a city where the new freedom of the mind rub shoulders with the old sins of the flesh. On the streets she discovers a stalking evil at large and witnesses the rise of the fundamentalist monk, Savonarola. Alessandra and her native Florence are caught between the Medici state with its luxury, learning and dazzling art and the hell-fire of Savonarola and the violence of his followers. And through it all the painter - and his art - exert an increasingly powerful and erotic pull.
'The Birth Of Venus' is a tour de force from one of Britain's most innovative thriller writers.
