April Blood

"An intriguing book.... Every situation and character Martines presents to us in April Blood is of marvelous complexity: he writes of the learned Pope turned feverish nepotist, the hardened mercenary who will not kill in church, the lucid Lorenzo, who hates the Church's nepotism and yet does everything he can to get his son made a cardinal; then we have the general picture of a religious age in love with transgression, of a republican citizenry avid for the trappings of hierarchy.... The exhilaration and humiliation of a fake democracy, at once so relevant to the modern world and so difficult to pin down, is the real subject of April Blood and the key to understanding the Pazzi conspiracy."--Tim Page, The New York Review of Books |k No