Sarah Dunant Totally Explained

Everything about Sarah Dunant totally explained

Sarah Dunant (born Linda Dunant 8 August, 1950, in London, England) is the author of many international bestsellers, most recently The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan. She attended Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, London and read history at Newnham College, Cambridge and has worked in theatre, radio and television. The Birth of Venus is now being made into a film. She lives in London for most of the year.

Early career

Sarah Dunant began as a writer for publications like Spare Rib and many other publications. As a broadcaster she was one of the principals responsible for hosting The Late Show on BBC2 and has also presented Woman's Hour and A Good Read on Radio 4.

The Books

Sarah Dunant's work ranges over a number of genres and eras, going from hard-boiled detective fiction to historical thriller. Her narratives are hard to categorise due to their inventive treatment of time and space, and a favoured device of hers is to run two or more plot strands concurrently, as she does to great effect in Mapping the Edge. A common concern running through her work is women's perceptions and points of view, but the serious stuff is always embedded deep below the surface. Her work is polished and taut, and her handling of narrative pace is nearly always impeccable.
Her characters are frequently women of the world, able to hold their own against men and open to sexual experimentation and rule-breaking, which drives a lot of her plots' energy. This is probably because even when she sets her story in Renaissance Florence, as she does in The Birth of Venus, the 'whodunit' plot construct still persists, and the quest to solve a mystery or a crime carries on alongside the emotional involvements of the characters. Having said that, it wouldn't be adequate to say that she writes 'thrillers', since there's much more to be found in the books than generic thriller-type entertainment.

Hannah Wolfe

Sarah Dunant is the creator of the female private detective Hannah Wolfe who features in the trilogy Birth Marks, Fatlands and Under My Skin. Superficially genre fiction, these books nevertheless show the experimental boldness that characterises Dunant's later works. In Birth Marks Hannah sets out to investigate the death of a young girl who is eight months pregnant, and is drawn into a gripping story involving the ethics of surrogate motherhood. Fatlands has Hannah playing nursemaid to the difficult teenage daughter of a scientist. As she investigates the Vandamed Corporation she's caught between the ethics of large scale industrial animal experimentation and the concerns of NGOs and activists on the other. In Under My Skin Hannah ends up at a health farm and in the process of investigating a series of sabotage attacks, confronts issues to do with the beauty industry and women's relationships with their bodies. Hannah herself is a hard-boiled, wisecracking, tough character in the hard-core tradition of detective fiction, but with her own individual twists. She could be compared with Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski and Cordelia Grey in P. D. James's works, but she's closer to Ellery Queen, Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret or Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in her attitude to her work and the 'feel' of her character.

Bibliography

Exterminating Angels (with Peter Busby as Peter Dunant), 1983
Intensive Care (with Peter Busby as Peter Dunant), 1986
Snow Storms in a Hot Climate, 1988
Birth Marks, 1991
Fatlands, 1993
The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, 1995
Under My Skin, 1995
The Age of Anxiety, 1996
Transgressions, 1997
Mapping the Edge, 1999
The Birth of Venus, 2003
In the Company of the Courtesan, 2006

Further Information

Get more info on 'Sarah Dunant'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://sarah_dunant.totallyexplained.com">Sarah Dunant Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.