DESCRIPTION

The author of Hamnet--New York Times best seller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner--brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.

Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?

As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court's eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess's future hangs entirely in the balance.

Full of the beauty and emotion with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell turns her talents to Renaissance Italy in an extraordinary portrait of a resilient young woman's battle for her very survival.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You'd Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.

REVIEWS

“O'Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave this story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station . . . You may know the history, and you may think you know what's coming, but don't be so sure. O'Farrell and Lucrezia, with her 'crystalline, righteous anger, ' will always be one step ahead of you.. . . O'Farrell [is] one of the most exciting novelists alive." —The Washington Post

"[A] glittering, propulsive new novel . . . Few writers play as confidently with the nuts and bolts of language, and historical characters netted from the past. O'Farrell adroitly shrinks Lucrezia to her own vanishing point, even if the probable cause of the duchess's demise was a pulmonary embolism rather than poison. O'Farrell's creative license beautifully frames the chasms that open up between husband and wife, implicating an institution that has galvanized our canonical writers, including the Victorian poet Robert Browning, whose dramatic monologue 'My Last Duchess' was inspired by Branzino's portrait of Lucrezia." —Oprah Daily