1782. The thirteen-year-old daughter of a Venetian merchant is lured from her bath by a cat and finds herself in the arms of Casanova – the legendary lover of women.

Twenty-five years later Cecilia is in Albania. She is now a portrait painter of great renown, her professional fame eclipsed only by her reputation as the last woman in Venice to have been loved by Casanova. Enter a young man from England, a troubled poet looking for adventure at any price – a man who begins his relationship with Cecilia with the announcement: ‘I rather look on love as a hostile transaction.’ He is George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Cecilia now finds out about the darker side of passion.

‘Lovric immerses us in the life and loves of beautiful Cecilia, the artistic daughter of an eighteenth-century Venetian merchant. The setting is faded yet decadent – think gondolas, palazzos, delicate food and amorous trysts. It’s a lavish description of a sensual education that drips detail and drama.’ Elle

‘This novel mixes fiction with reality as surely as water mixes with the air and stone in that strange, floating city. Part love story, part lesson in aesthetics, part history lesson, this is a fascinating book.’ Tatler

‘A lush book, dripping with opulent descriptions and elegant imagery … Ambitiously imagined.’ Australian Book Review

‘Think gondolas and pigeons and A Room with a View … a dreamy, fantastical novel.’ Sunday Business Post

‘A dazzling baroque tale.’ Sunday Tribune

‘In terms of subject matter, this novel has the lot: Venice in the dying days of the republic, Casanova, Byron, sex and art – and talking cats … This is Lovric’s first novel. It’s lush but composed and she clearly knows Venice intimately.’ Melbourne Age

‘This is a novel that demands to be taken seriously … Cecilia is a charming character, and ultimately this is a touching, and in places even moving read.’ Independent on Sunday

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Venice, 1668. Sosia Simeon, a free-spirited sensualist, is the lover of many men in the fabled city, though married to one she despises. On the edge of the Grand Canal, Wendelin von Speyer sets up the first printing press in Venice and looks for the book that will make his fortune. When he tempts fate by publishing Catullus, the Latin poet whose desperate and unrequited love inspired the most tender and erotic poems of antiquity, a scandal is set in motion that will change all their lives for ever.
 

‘Lovric reveals herself as a gifted and individual phrasemaker – always revealing, never anachronistic. Add to this writing talent the many other virtues Lovric brings to The Floating Book – a command of her subject that is so intimate that it is almost indecent; a similarly intimate facility with Catullus’s poetry, which she translates herself; her thorough and (more important) judicious use of her prodigious research – and you can see how rewarding The Floating Book can be … it is refreshing and heartening to read a book by a writer who is genuinely interested in words.’ Edward Docx, Washington Post

‘Meticulous historical detail and a splendid, complex story make this portrait of Venice and its denizens memorable and moving.’ Booklist

‘Lush, exotic and dripping with sensuality … A fantastic novel of epic proportions.’ The Good Book Guide

‘Lovric spins an intrigue-laden tale of destructive lusts and mixed-up loves in the early days of the printing press. She has an eye for sensual detail, conveying the sights and smells of the city’s markets and palazzos.’ Publishers Weekly

‘A richly textured tale of love and learning, lust and superstition that is at turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, exhilarating and terrifying … It is a book that demands the reader’s attention.’ Philadelphia Inquirer

‘The Floating Book, whose prose more stylishly mimics its subject than any novel in recent memory, is the sort of fever dream from which you prefer not to awaken. The denizens and doges of Venice make their most human way through the humid city of our imaginations.’ Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Son of a Witch

‘As erudite as it is erotic … utterly inhabiting the preening, wanton, indulgent spirit of the Venetian Renaissance as few before her. And where has one ever found such erudition coupled with Lovric’s gift for sensuous detail, for such erotic heat?’ Wilton  Barnhardt, author of Gospel

‘Opulent and ravishing – you find yourself thinking about the nature of obsession … about witchcraft … about Judaism, about the effects of the plague, prostitution, medicine … hypocrisy, betrayal, loyalty and disgrace. In short, fifteenth-century Venice slowly comes alive.’ Washington Post

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'So at fifteen, spread belly-down upon the floor, a black sheet hunched over me and a candle at my foot and head, my lips pressed on stone, litanies in my ears, as the priest broke and entered my shocked fist to slide the ring on my finger, I promised to take no other husband than Christ. I almost meant it. In that heady moment the vow itself seemed no great sacrifice: I’d never known a man, but I had tasted chocolate ...'

One unforgettable night in 1785, in a theatre in Drury Lane, the heady alchemy of love and murder suddenly fuses the lives of Mimosina Dolcezza, a Venetian actress and Valentine Greatrakes, prince of London’s medical underworld. Dangerous secrets and elaborate lies soon send the lovers spinning in different directions, desperate for the truth not just about one another but also their own pasts. Their quest takes them from the dank environs of London’s Bankside to the enigmatic city of Venice; her playhouses and brothels, apothecaries and quack doctors, spies and noblemen, her convents and her crypts.

‘With vivid descriptions of the seedier parts of eighteenth-century London and the upper echelons of Venetian society, together with a series of intertwined plot lines that have the two main characters linked in a race through both cities, this novel makes compelling reading.’  Sunday Times

‘A rollicking read that evokes the squalor and danger of eighteenth-century Europe as well as it does the glamour.’ Daily Telegraph, Australia

‘This is a fast-moving tale of love, murder, and lust … Already an expert on Venice, Lovric has researched eighteenth-century remedies, and a recipe for a fascinating concoction awaits the reader at the start of every chapter.’ The Good Book Guide

‘There’s a whiff of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume in the delicious and seductive recipes Lovric borrows to pepper her tale.’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘A bodice ripper for the Mensa set, The Remedy is a ravishing, meticulously authentic buffet of words and sensations … If romance, intrigue, and pantaloons are your thing, dear reader, salut!’ Entertainment Weekly

‘Labyrinthine, grandly imagined … titillating but fresh, graceful prose …’ Publishers Weekly

‘A  novel magisterially recorded … that makes a gift of splendid pictures, so that we seem to be there with the protagonists of the story, to breathe in the brocades and crystal of Venice, the fog of London’s Bankside.’ Federico di Nardi, www.thrillermagazine.it

‘From first page to last, Lovric transfixes one with her superb language, imagery and twists of plot. At no time does the confidence or quality of narrative falter. Referring to her novel, The Floating Book, one critic describes her writing as “Prose as luminous as a Venetian dawn”. I shall be watching for her next book.’  Mslexia

The book is a sublime example of the novelist's art … It is an extraordinary display of virtuosity, featuring passion, hate, fear, revenge, brutality, and kindness. It is a pleasure and a delight to read … Michelle Lovric has written a book which is every bit as good as those by Sarah Waters
Grumpy Old Bookman weblog, April 18th 2006
 

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