The Birth of Venus

By: Sarah Dunant

Narrated by: Jenny Sterling

'Simply amazing, so brilliantly written . . . almost intolerably exciting at times, and at others, equally poignant' ANTONIA FRASER

'A beautiful serpent of a novel, seductive and dangerous . . . consumes utterly - but the experience is all pleasure' SIMON SCHAMA

'She writes like a painter, and thinks like a philosopher . . . a tour de force of storytelling' AMANDA FOREMAN

'An erotic and gripping thriller . . . Theology has rarely looked so sexy' INDEPEDENT

Alessandra is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back with him from northern Europe to decorate the walls of their family chapel in their Florentine palazzo. Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter's abilities. As Medici Florence is threated by the hellfire of the monk Savonarola, the painter and his dazzling art exert an ever more powerful and erotic pull.

'Dunant has created a vivid and compellingly believable picture of Renaissance Florence . . . A magnificent novel' TELEGRAPH

'This moving, gripping and impressive work is Dunant's most beautifully achieved novel' SUNDAY TIMES

'[Dunant's] control, pace, and instinct are well-nigh impeccable' FINANCIAL TIMES©2003 Sarah Dunant (P)2005 Time Warner AudioBooks

Incoherent abridgement - ludicrious references

Would you try another book from Sarah Dunant and/or Jenny Sterling?

no

Would you ever listen to anything by Sarah Dunant again?

no

What didn’t you like about Jenny Sterling’s performance?

irritating voice

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Birth of Venus?

it was an incoherent abridgement - unbalanced. Long drawn out parts and then rushing through teh last 1/2 of the story in the last hour. To be fair, I do not like abridged versions and msised that when I ordered it, but it was terribly done in this case.

Any additional comments?

Especially annoying - having a 15th century narrator use words like "crap" and talk about contractions being 5 min apart - discredited the whole suspended disbelief.