The Brightest Star

A thirst for learning and a passion for astronomy draw an extraordinary young woman deep into the intellectual maelstrom, political complexities, and religious extremism of Renaissance Florence. This beautifully crafted novel will appeal to readers of Karen Brooks' The Good Wife of Bath and Pip Williams' Dictionary of Lost Words.

The Brightest Star is set in 1496, the height of the Renaissance and its flowering of intellectual and artistic endeavour, yet the city-state of Florence is in the grip of fundamentalist preacher Friar Girolamo Savonarola. Its good people believe the Lord speaks through him, just as certainly as the Sun circles the Earth.

For Leonarda Lunetta, the eldest daughter of the learned Signore Vincenzio Fusili, religion is not as interesting as the books she shares with her beloved father. Reading is an escape from the ridicule flung her way, for Luna is not like other girls. She was born with a misshapen leg, and that, along with her passion for intellectual pursuits, alters how society sees her and how she sees the world.

Luna wants to know, to learn, to become an astronomer who charts the night sky—certainly not the dutiful, marriageable daughter all of Florence society insists upon. So when Luna meets astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, she is not surprised that his heretical beliefs confirm her view that the world is not as it is presented—or how it could be. These dangerous ideas bring her into conflict with the preacher Savonarola, and her future is changed irrevocably as politics, extremism, and belief systems ignite in a dangerous conflagration.

Luna is a woman born out of time, the brightest star of her generation, but can she reconcile the girl of her father's making with this new version of herself? And if she does, will Renaissance Italy prove too perilous and dark a place for a free-thinking woman?