Sarah Dunant Books In Order

Borgias Books In Publication Order

  1. Blood & Beauty (2013)
  2. In the Name of the Family (2017)

Hannah Wolfe Books In Publication Order

  1. Birth Marks (1991)
  2. Fatlands (1993)
  3. Under My Skin (1995)

Maria Masterson Books In Publication Order

  1. Exterminating Angels (1984)
  2. Intensive Care (1986)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Snow Storms In A Hot Climate (1995)
  2. Transgressions (1997)
  3. Mapping the Edge (1999)
  4. The Birth of Venus (2003)
  5. In the Company of the Courtesan (2006)
  6. Sacred Hearts (2008)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The War of the Words (1994)
  2. The Age of Anxiety (1996)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Arc Short Stories (1998)

Borgias Book Covers

Hannah Wolfe Book Covers

Maria Masterson Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Sarah Dunant Books Overview

Birth Marks

In Birth Marks, private investigator Hannah Wolfe gets a case worthy of the great detective novels she so admires. At first glance, this one doesn’t fit the bill: she’s asked to find a missing ballet dancer, Carolyn Hamilton. When Carolyn’s body is fished out of the Thames, stones in her pockets and an eight month old fetus in her belly, the police think it’s a no brainer: Single pregnant woman can’t face her impending responsibilities, takes a leap off a bridge. But Hannah can’t shake the suspicion that something else is going on. Hannah’s investigation takes her from the London dance world to the upper echelons of Parisian society in search of the unborn child’s father. But his explanation only raises more questions, and for Hannah the case grows more treacherous, fueling her own ambivalent feelings about relationships and motherhood.

Fatlands

A decade before her dazzling breakthrough novel, The Birth of Venus, author Sarah Dunant won Britain’s prestigious Silver Dagger award for Fatlands, a Hannah Wolfe mystery. In Fatlands, private investigator Hannah Wolfe, who’s independent though not invincible, idealistic but definitely not naive, has taken on one of the less glamorous jobs in the security world chaperoning teenage rebel Mattie Shepherd around London. But Mattie’s father is paying Hannah lots of money more than the job is worth, it seems. Or perhaps not. The girl’s father is on the Animal Liberation Front’s hit list. But why? When violence explodes, tearing the family apart, this is what Hannah must discover. Her obsession with the truth nearly kills her, wrecking her private life and dragging her into a vortex of lies and betrayal.

Under My Skin

A decade before her dazzling breakthrough novel, The Birth of Venus, Silver Dagger Award winning author Sarah Dunant won critical acclaim for her Hannah Wolfe crime novels. In Under My Skin, private investigator Hannah Wolfe’s cushy new assignment takes her to the sumptuous Castle Dean health spa. While being plucked, crimped, steamed, and oiled, Hannah is ideally placed to probe some reported cases of sabotage fish in the Jacuzzi and steel nails in the massage heads. But spa owner Olivia Marchant has other problems besides sabotage. Someone is threatening her husband, Maurice, one of London’s leading cosmetic surgeons and the man responsible for reconstructing many of the world’s rich and famous. In a culture where no one wants to grow old and everyone seems to believe in the power of the knife, Hannah feels like an alien visitor. People will do anything in the name of beauty perhaps even commit murder.

Snow Storms In A Hot Climate

Marla’s best friend, Elly, left England two years ago on a soul searching trip through South America. Except for receiving a few postcards, Marla has not heard from her since. Then, Marla receives a strange letter from Elly begging her to fly to New York. But the person Marla meets at the airport is a very different woman from the strong, carefree friend she remembers. Elly, now well dressed and thin, has acquired a park view apartment, a house in the Hamptons, and a charismatic, manipulative, cocaine smuggling boyfriend named Lenny. As Marla tries to free her friend from the dual addictions of love and cocaine, she unravels a story of seduction and power in Columbia and of desire and betrayal in California. Caught in a web of deceptions, the threat of violence mounting around them, Marla decides to take on Lenny and his empire. But Lenny like the drug he peddles has no intention of letting Elly go.

Transgressions

Elizabeth is a modern woman. Smart. Independent. As sexual as she wants to be with whomever she wants to be. But a breakup with her academic boyfriend has hit her harder than she cares to admit. And while her latest gig, translating a glitzy Czech thriller into English, offends her literary sensibilities, it arouses others with its steamy scenes of eroticism, violence, submission, and dominance. Then, when her favorite Van Morrison CD disappears from its rack and her house is inexplicably violated, Elizabeth is afraid she’s starting to lose it she even consults a local vicar about the possibility of poltergeists. But what this woman in the lovely Victorian is experiencing is not supernatural. Nor is it madness. For in the dead of night, she will suddenly come face to face with her tormentor. She will smell him, she will touch him, and she will make a choice. Then the real haunting will begin.

Mapping the Edge

Anna, a self sufficient and reliable single mother, packs her bags one day for a short vacation to Italy. She leaves her beloved daughter at home in London with good friends. When Anna doesn t return, everyone begins to make excuses, until the likelihood that she might not come back at all becomes chillingly clear. In this dazzling work of suspense, Sarah Dunant interweaves parallel narratives that are stretched taut with tension even as they raise difficult questions about love, trust, and accountability. We are challenged, unnerved, and ultimately exhilarated as Dunant redefines the boundaries of the psychological thriller.

The Birth of Venus

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. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter s abilities.

But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. 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. 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.

The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain s most innovative writers of literary suspense. 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 hero*ine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.

From the Hardcover edition.

In the Company of the Courtesan

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.

Thus begins In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant s epic novel of life in Renaissance Italy. Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice, the shimmering city born out of water to become a miracle of east west trade: rich and rancid, pious and profitable, beautiful and squalid.

With a mix of courage and cunning they infiltrate Venetian society. Together they make the perfect partnership: the sharp tongued, sharp witted dwarf, and his vibrant mistress, trained from birth to charm, entertain, and satisfy men who have the money to support her.

Yet as their fortunes rise, this perfect partnership comes under threat, from the searing passion of a lover who wants more than his allotted nights to the attentions of an admiring Turk in search of human novelties for his sultan s court. But Fiammetta and Bucino s greatest challenge comes from a young crippled woman, a blind healer who insinuates herself into their lives and hearts with devastating consequences for them all.

A story of desire and deception, sin and religion, loyalty and friendship, In the Company of the Courtesan paints a portrait of one of the world s greatest cities at its most potent moment in history: It is a picture that remains vivid long after the final page.

Sacred Hearts

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. And the arrival of Santa Caterina s new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core. Ripped by her family from an illicit love affair, sixteen year old Serafina is willful, emotional, sharp, and defiant young enough to have a life to look forward to and old enough to know when that life is being cut short. Her first night inside the walls is spent in an incandescent rage so violent that the dispensary mistress, Suora Zuana, is dispatched to the girl s cell to sedate her. Thus begins a complex relationship of trust and betrayal between the young rebel and the clever, scholarly nun, for whom the girl becomes the daughter she will never have. As Serafina rails against her incarceration, others are drawn into the drama: the ancient, mysterious Suora Magdalena with her history of visions and ecstasies locked in her cell; the ferociously devout novice mistress Suora Umiliana, who comes to see in the postulant a way to extend her influence; and, watching it all, the abbess, Madonna Chiara, a woman as fluent in politics as she is in prayer. As disorder and rebellion mount, it is the abbess s job to keep the convent stable while, outside its walls, the dictates of the Counter Reformation begin to purge the Catholic Church and impose on the nunneries a regime of terrible oppression. Sarah Dunant, the bestselling author of The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, brings this intricate Renaissance world compellingly to life. Amid Sacred Hearts is a rich, engrossing, multifaceted love story, encompassing the passions of the flesh, the exultation of the spirit, and the deep, enduring power of friendship. From the Hardcover edition.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment