Carnevale

When I think of Venice as she was in 1782, I think of a hundred thousand souls all devoted to pleasure. Souls like that become insubstantial and faintly luminous. You see, we were in the phosphorescent stage of decay...Richly imagined and as irresistible as its magical setting, Carnevale evokes the three great loves of the painter Cecilia Cornaro: Casanova, Byron and La Serenissima herself.

M.R. Lovric's debut novel is a lush account of love and intrigue in 18th-century Venice ... A dazzling baroque tale, Lovric immerses us in the life and loves of beautiful Cecilia, the artistic daughter of an eighteenth-century Venetian merchant. The setting is faded yet decadent - think gondalas, palazzi, delicate food and amorous trysts. It's a lavish description of a sensual education that drips detail and drama, Venice, the decadent, beautiful and doomed city is the setting for this quasi-historical drama set during the last decades of the 18th century and the opening years of the 19th. This novel mixes fiction with reality as surely as water mixes with the air and stone in that strange floating city ... Part love story, part lesson in aesthetics, part history lesson, this is a fascinating book, A lush book, dripping with opulent descriptions and elegant imagery ... Ambitiously imagined, A truly sensual glide

Michelle Lovric is the author of four other novels - The Floating Book (winner of a London Arts Award and chosen as a WH Smith Read of the Week), The Remedy (Longlisted for the Orange Prize 2005), The Book of Human Skin (a TV Book Club pick in 2011), and, most recently, The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, as well as four children’s books. Her book Love Letters: An Anthology of Passion was a New York Times bestseller. She divides her time between London and Venice. www.michellelovric.com