Perhaps a dream is the subconscious trying to remember your past life.
Her heroines are women who trust reason: a neuropsychologist, a journalist, an art restorer, a photographer, a guide and interpreter, a teacher. They do not go looking for mysteries. The mysteries find them — in a stranger's dream, in a letter from a long-dead mother, in a portrait above the fireplace.
Every novel is two stories, centuries apart. Florence today and Milan gripped by plague and the fear of witches. Rome's grand houses and a medieval castle where the women of one family die every second generation. Modern Madrid and the court of Philip II. Paris and Pompeii a minute before the eruption. Jerusalem, Constantinople, Assisi. A boarded-up Russian estate where weddings and balls were held in 1814.
These are books about a choice made once and paid for over centuries — and about the possibility of putting right even what happened five hundred years ago. There is fear and fire in them, but also irony, love and light at the end.
All six novels can be read here in full.
