1527. While the Papal city of Rome burns, two of her most interesting and wily citizens slip away, their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed as the enemy breaks down their doors.This fabulous courtesan and her companion are already planning their future.They head for the shimmering beauty of Venice, rich and rancid, pious and profitable, beautiful and squalid. But there will be devastating consequences for all...

From the internationally bestselling author of The Birth of Venus, this is a breathtaking novel about love, beauty, the politics of sex and the power of loyalty.

`Dunant is in her historical element in Renaissance Florence'-The Times

Santa Montefiore
The Gypsy Madonna

Mischa knows what it is to be abandoned. His German father disappeared at the end of the war, leaving him and his mother to endure the hatred and contempt of all the French villagers, the two of them against the world. And his surrogate father vanishes too, with no word of explanation. Mischa bears these scars into manhood. Only when his mother dies, revealing the existence of a priceless masterpiece, does he go on the trail of his own history. He makes a pilgrimage into the past, to that French village of his childhood, and there he uncovers the secret of the Gypsy Madonna.

Rosie Thomas
Iris and Ruby

Stiflingly quiet and sad, Iris's beautiful Cairo house is suddenly awoken by the unexpected arrival of her troubled young granddaughter, Ruby. But an unlikely bond develops as Ruby helps to record the fragile Iris's now deteriorating memories of the vibrant life she enjoyed in Cairo during the Second World War; a time when she lost her heart to her one true love - the enigmatic Captain Xan Molyneux - and then lost him to the ravages of the war. With skilfully intertwined narratives, Rosie Thomas has created an atmospheric novel, rich and alive with descriptions of the bustling streets of Cairo and the vast, foreboding desert surrounding it.