Faber & Faber £7.99 (406pp) £7.59 from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030

The Ground Is Burning, By Samuel Black

 

Boyd Tonkin Author Biography

Boyd Tonkin

Boyd Tonkin is Literary Editor at The Independent. An award-winning journalist, he was formerly Social Policy Editor of the New Statesman and has broadcast extensively for BBC arts and current affairs programmes. He has judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature.

More articles from this journalist

Friday 10 February 2012

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It sounds like a Renaissance replay of Stoppard's drama Travesties: Leonardo, Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia, all testily holed up in the besieged castle of Imola in 1502. But it happened. Paul Strathern wrote a book about the weird conjunction of these giant planets.

Black converts their encounters into high-spirited, zestfully crafted fiction. His novel switches between soliloquies: the artist, the politician, the warlord, along with the mercenary Vitellozzo and Dorotea, the mistress of Borgia who knits the strands of plot and personality.

With a few wobbles, Black gives each a credible voice while conveying the true stories of their blood-soaked, vision-driven epoch. His swaggering patchwork of creative and destructive egos snares the spirit of the age.

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