Tuscan Daughter : A Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER 

In Renaissance Florence, a young artist searching for her missing mother is discovered by arch-rivals Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci  

In Tuscany during the early 1500s, Beatrice, a peasant girl, finds herself alone in the countryside after her father is killed and her mother disappears into the walled city of Florence. Barefoot and defiant, Beatrice enters the city to sell her family’s olive oil to the artists who toil to create masterworks that will elevate the status of the republic. 

While selling her wares, Beatrice befriends Michelangelo as he struggles to sculpt David and helps heal a melancholic woman who is having her portrait painted by the brilliant but aging Leonardo. Bonds deepen even while Michelangelo and Leonardo are pitted against each other in a competition organized by Machiavelli. 

Set during five epic years, Tuscan Daughter reveals the humanity and struggles of a young woman who longs to find the only family she has left while seeking to be an artist in her own right. In her own way, Beatrice influences the artistic masters of the time to find peace with their inner demons as they stake everything on the power of beauty to transform and inspire.

LISA ROCHON is the author of the bestselling novel Tuscan Daughter. She is also an award-winning architecture critic, cultural commentator and essayist. She is the two-time winner of a National Newspaper Award for her “City Space” column in The Globe and Mail and the recipient of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s President’s Award for Architectural Journalism. Educated at the University of Toronto and in Paris at Sciences Po and École du Louvre, she is passionate about seeing the world afresh and with new complexity through female eyes. Rochon splits her time between Toronto and Europe.