The Remedy

I was an unwilling nun, bundled into the convent by a family that had briefly lost its head . . . The nuns caught me early by my sweet tooth, hanging sugared almonds, balsamic lozenges, and candied fruit in the humid swoop of the orchard branches whenever we went . . . I married Christ in a delirium spun of sweetened wine. I was only bitter later, when I saw little girls dreambound in the smell of almonds and burnt sugar in the orchard. For by then of course I knew full well . . . that God did not make such trees. So begins The Remedy, a lush and riveting new work of historical fiction by the author of the The Floating Book. Set against the vivid, haunting backdrops of eighteenth-century Venice and London, The Remedy weaves together the stories of three mesmerizing characters: Venetian actress Mimosina Dolcezza -- snatched from a convent as a young woman, employed as an actress and agente provocatrice by powerful and shadowy European power brokers; the dark prince of London's medical underworld, the roguish Valentine Greatrakes; and the strange, peevish child-woman Pevenche, whose fate and identity are at the heart of the book's mystery. The love affair between Mimosina and Valentine begins in the wake of a murder and tumbles forward based on dangerous secrets and elaborate lies. As the lovers unravel the tangled truths of each other's pasts, The Remedy lures us along a path from the dank environs of London's Bankside to the vibrant streets of Venice, through playhouses and brothels, convents and crypts, with a sensual eye for detail that breathes heady, intoxicating life into the era. Long-listed for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, The Remedy is scholarly, seductive, and teeming with Rabelaisian characters -- a gorgeous novel that will keep the reader aching with suspense and haunted long after the final page is turned.