an old-fashioned rollercoaster of a story. Dunant’s biggest and best work to date, this intelligently readable account of formative events and monster players has Hilary Mantel–era quality best-seller stamped all over it.” “The big, bad Borgia dynasty undergoes modern reconsideration in epic new biofiction. Stripping away the myths around the Borgias, Blood & Beauty is a majestic novel that breathes life into this astonishing family and celebrates the raw power of history itself: compelling, complex and relentless. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Later immortalized in Machiavelli’s The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women, and power must use papacy and family-in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia-in order to succeed.Ĭesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest-though increasingly unstable-weapon. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians.

Now Sarah Dunant turns her discerning eye to one of the world’s most intriguing and infamous families-the Borgias-in an engrossing work of literary fiction.īy the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched by its brutality and corruption, nowhere more than in Rome and inside the Church. The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Italian Renaissance novels-The Birth of Venus, In the Company of the Courtesan, and Sacred Hearts-has an exceptional talent for breathing life into history.

Blood and beauty the borgias