Secrecy

Product Description

It is Florence 1691. The Renaissance is long gone & the city is a dark repressive place where everything is forbidden & anything is possible. The Enlightenment may be just around the corner but knowledge is still the property of the few & they guard it fiercely. Art sex & power
- these as always are the obsessions. Facing serious criminal charges Gaetano Zummo is forced to flee his native Siracusa at the age of twenty first to Palermo then Naples but always has the feeling that he is being pursued by his past & that he will never be free of it. Zummo works an artist in wax. He is fascinated by the plague & makes small wooden cabinets in which he places graphic tortured models of the dead & dying. But Cosimo III Tuscany's penultimate Medici ruler gives Zummo his most challenging commission yet & as he tackles it his path entwines with that of the apothecary's daughter Faustina whose secret is even more explosive than his. Poignant but paranoid sensual yet chilling Secrecy is a novel that buzzes with intrigue & ideas. It is a love story a murder mystery a portrait of a famous city in an age of austerity an exercise in concealment & revelation but above all it is a trapdoor narrative one story dropping unexpectedly into another the ground always slippery uncertain...