Michelle Lovric

It's 1782. The 13-year-old daughter of a Venetian merchant family is lured naked from her bath by a stray cat and finds herself in the arms of Casanova - the legendary seducer of women. Twenty-five years later Cecilia is in Albania, now a portrait painter of some renown. Enter a young man from...

In 18th-century Venice, Minguillo Fasan, heir to a fortune, contrives to dispatch of his sister, Marcella, condemning her to the fate of a nun. But Marcella Fasan is tougher than Minguillo imagines, and, aided by a servant, a painter, a skin-obsessed doctor, a Scottish merchant and a...

It begins with a singing and dancing septet in dusty church halls. But it is not the sisters’ dancing that fills the seats: it is the torrents of hair they let loose at the end of each show. And their hair will pull them out of poverty, to the salons of Dublin and the palazzi of Venice. It...