In The Name of the Family - Tapa dura

Sarah Dunant's sparkling novel, In the Name of the Family, is girded by a keen political intelligence and a stunning feel for Italy in the years around 1500 (Lauro Martines, Emeritus Professor off European history at University of California and one of world's foremost authorities on the Italian Renaissance)

A thrilling period vividly brought to life (Woman & Home)

Reading In the Name of the Family, I began to smell the scent of oranges and wood smoke on the Ferrara breeze. Such Renaissance-rich details fill out the humanity of the Borgias, rendering them into the kind of relatable figures whom we would hope to discover behind the cold brilliance of The Prince (National Public Radio, USA)

In the end, what's a historical novelist's obligation to the dead? Accuracy? Empathy? Justice? Or is it only to make them live again? Dunant pays these debts with a passion (Washington Post)

As vivid a recreation of the Renaissance past as its predecessor (Sunday Times)

"Which one of us will go down in history?" asks Cesare of Machiavelli. There are many words written about both men in fiction and non-fiction. However Dunant has a storyteller's instincts for the telling detail and the broad sweep of history. This, and her glorious prose make Dunant's version irresistible (Antonia Senior The Times)

An intimate knowledge of Renaissance history powers a story crackling with energy (Elizabeth Buchan Daily Mail)

What distinguishes and elevates to the first order Sarah Dunant's series of five novels set in Renaissance Italy is that she combines flawless historical scholarship with beguiling storytelling . . . Dunant is sensitive to
contemporary echoes and so offers into the bargain a lesson from history for our divided age

(Observer)

Dunant has made completely her own the story of Italy's most infamous ruling family. Retaining the knack for plotting and pacing from the crime novels that began her career, she depicts history in a way that we can see, hear and smell . . . Dunant's Italian novels are an enthralling education (Mark Lawson Guardian)

For the last 14 years, her historical fiction has been coming close to doing for Renaissance Italy what Hilary Mantel has done for Tudor England. So deeply does she burrow into the past that her readers are able to imagine it almost as clearly as if it were the present, reinvesting it with that knifeedge uncertainty with which we ourselves imagine the future . . . This is Dunant's fifth Renaissance novel, and like the rest sparkles with the kind of details that fires the imagination (Herald)