From Sarah Dunant, acclaimed author of The Birth of Venus and In the
Company of the Courtesan, comes an engrossing new novel set in a
convent in Renaissance Italy where a defiant sixeteen-year-old girl has
just been confined against her will--for life. Santa
Caterina's new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake
the convent to its core.
Serafina, a willful, emotional & furious girl, has just been ripped from her proposed marriage and sent by her noble family to Santa Caterina. During her first night inside, such is her violent, incandescent rage that the dispensary mistress, Suora Zuana, is sent to her cell to calm her with a draft of herbs. Thus begins a complex relationship of trust and betrayal. And while outside the convent walls the forces of the Counter-Reformation push for ever more repressive changes, Serafina's rebellious spirit challenges not only Zuana but many other nuns who have made peace with the isolated life.
A rich, captivating, multifaceted love story, Sacred Hearts is a novel about power, creativity, passion -- both secular and spiritual -- and the indomitable spirit of women in an age when religious, political, and social forces were all stacked against them.
AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND
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UK
Manchester Literary Festival I Historical Readers Day
Sarah reads excerpts from Sacred Hearts with the Doric String Quartet and Musica Secreta on BBC Radio 3 - LISTEN HERE
Listen to the dramatization of Sacred Hearts on BBC Radio 4 with Geraldine James as Zuana, Eileen Atkins as the Abbess & Nathalie Dormer as Serafina - LISTEN HERE
Sacred Hearts, Secret Music
divine art 25077, 2009
Our first CD for two years, Sacred Hearts, Secret Music offers our vision of music as it could have been heard in the fictional convent of Santa Caterina, the setting for Sarah Dunant's new novel, Sacred Hearts. - READ MORE
Denman Island Writers' Festival builds on success
The Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival, this year on July 16 to July 19, has the growing reputation as one of the West Coast's premiere literary events. What's not to like? - READ MORE
Sinner and saint
The dark, wild tale of Radegunda, a captured queen who becomes the founding abbess of a convent in the dark ages, helped Sarah Dunant while she was researching her own novel about nuns in 16th-century Italy - READ MORE