Description
In its romantic and dangerous tour of history, Barry Unsworth's Stone Virgin rivals A. S. Byatt's Possession.
A mysterious sculpture of a beautiful and erotic Madonna holds the key to the Fornarini family's secrets. When Raikes, a conservation expert, tries to restore her, he is swept under the statue's spell and swept under the spell of the seductive Chiara Litsov, a member of the Fornarini family now married to a famous sculptor. Raikes finds himself losing all moral grounding as his love for statue and woman intertwine in lust and murder.
"No brief synopsis could suggest the sinuous intricacy of Stone Virgin or the adroitness with which Barry Unsworth manipulates the weighty mysteries of love, death, creation, faith, evil and the lure of history." —Amanda Heller, Boston Globe
