Sacred Hearts
July 22nd, 2009 | Bookshelf | Add Your Comment »About the author: Sarah Dunant lives in London. Her latest novels, The Birth of Venus (2003), and her most recent book, In the Company of the Courtesan (2006), are set in Renaissance Italy. She is the creator of private investigator Hannah Wolfe, featured in Fatlands (1993), winner of a Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction.
The dark, wild tale of the Merovingian queen,Radegunda, helped Sarah Dunant while she was researching Sacred Hearts.
“I first read Julia O’Faolain’s vibrant and strange Women in the Wall two years ago, just before I started writing my own novel about nuns in a 16th century Italian convent. I had just come out of a year incarcerated in libraries and archives in Britain and Italy, and my head was reeling with wondrous and terrifying images and ideas. Most writers relate to that feelings of panic as you put away the notebooks and move to the keyboard, and I thought O’Faolain’s journey into a darker, wilder moment of history – the political and religious chaos of sixth-century Gaul and the life of Radegunda, who began as captured queen to King Clotair and ended as the founding abbess of a convent in Poitiers, and a Merovingian saint – might just help.” 
Notes on the book: Sacred Hearts is set in a convent in Ferrara, Italy, where a teenage nun attempts to break out to be reunited with her lover. The novice nun, Serafina, is befriended by the convent’s apothecary, who initially tries to subdue her hysteria with herbal remedies. As an unlikely relationship builds between the two women, other figures stand watching and waiting..
Learn more about Sacred Hearts at Sarah Dunant’s website.
