1DSTC Archives - Duckworth Books

Sinners of Starlight City

FROM INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR ANIKA SCOTT

Madame Mystique is a performer extraordinaire, come to work her scandalous magic at the glittering 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Of African American and Sicilian heritage, Mystique – aka Rosa Mancuso – and her fellow performers move on the margins. Her ambiguous status serves a hidden vendetta: she awaits the arrival of Paolo Amanta, the dashing pilot sent by Mussolini to dazzle spectators with a phenomenal air show.

Back in Sicily, Paolo’s band of young Fascists had murdered her relatives as the old Mafia families were swept from their palazzi with unsparing brutality. Rosa is fixed on revenge. Then her estranged cousin, Mina, comes to the Fair, begging her help to face down their American family. Sinners of Starlight City is an immersive story of injustice, retribution and redemption that asks: who decides who we are and where we belong?

The Ornatrix

Flavia was born with a birthmark marring her face in the shape of a bird in flight. A dyer’s daughter, she grows up in a secluded little house in the woods, away from prying eyes. Ashamed of the mark, her mother forces Flavia to conceal her face behind a veil. But on the night before her younger sister’s wedding, Flavia does something drastic, something that will draw her into a much wider and stranger world than she could have imagined: the convent of Santa Giuliana, just outside the city walls. There she meets Ghostanza, a courtesan turned widow, whose white-lead painted face entrances Flavia, and whose beauty and cruelty are unmatched. Flavia becomes her ornatrix: her hairdresser and personal maid.

But as white-lead paint rots the flesh below it, the bustling city, and Santa Giuliana, is rotting below the shimmer of wealth and privilege. And Flavia is drawn into a world of desire and jealousy that has devastating consequences. Set in sixteenth century and painted against a vivid historical Italian landscape, rich in description and character and with themes and characters relevant to today, it tackles issues of belonging, female identity and the perception of beauty. It cannot fail to move.

Young Michelangelo

This is a long-awaited and authoritative reinterpretation of the early life and career of arguably the greatest artist in history. Author John T. Spike surveys Michelangelo’s early life from birth to his early thirties, probing the thinking, artistic evolution and yearnings of a young man thoroughly convinced of his own exceptional talent. Spike explores Michelangelo’s involvement in the most troubling controversies of his age, and recreates Florence and Rome with vivid sketches of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leonardo, Julius II and Machiavelli. This is a prodigiously informative and compelling account that will fulfil the need for a major Michelangelo biography for this generation and many to come.

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