She went on to work extensively in radio and television, most notably as a presenter of BBC2's late night live arts programme, The Late Show in the 1990s and Night Waves, BBC Radio 3's nightly cultural discussion programme. She worked at BBC Radio 4 for two years in London, producing its then arts magazine Kaleidoscope, before travelling again, this time overland through North, Central and South America, a trip that became research material for her first solo novel Snow Storms in Hot Climate (1988), a thriller about the early cocaine trade in Colombia. In Tokyo, she worked as an English teacher and nightclub hostess for six months, before returning home through Southeast Asia. After she graduated, she earned an actor's equity card and moved to Tokyo, Japan. She then studied history at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was involved in the amateur theatrical club Footlights.

She went to Godolphin and Latymer, a local girls' grammar school. She is the daughter of David Dunant, a former Welsh airline steward who later became a manager at British Airways, and his French wife Estelle, who grew up in Bangalore, India. She is married with two daughters, and lives in London and Florence.ĭunant was born in 1950 and raised in London. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.Sarah Dunant (born 8 August 1950) is a British novelist, journalist, broadcaster, and critic. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain's most innovative writers of literary suspense. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra's married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art.

Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola's reactionary followers. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter's abilities.īut their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra's parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. 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 in the family's Florentine palazzo.

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant