Dorothy Dunnett - Gemini: The Eighth Book of The House of Niccolò

International Acclaim for Dorothy Dunnetts
GEMINI AND THE HOUSE OF NICCOL

Dunnett has brought her House of Niccol series to a triumphant end [and] has saved some of the best surprises in the series for last. She deserves a spot on any serious readers short list of masters of historical fiction.

The Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer

No one who has read the first seven volumes will want to skip this one.

Newsday

As a writer of historical romances, Dorothy Dunnett epitomizes [the genre]. She salts it with wit and intelligence and serves it with style and elegance.

San Francisco Chronicle

Dunnett is a storyteller who could teach Scheherazade a thing or two about pace, suspense and imaginative invention.

The New York Times

The House of Niccol books amount to an extraordinary achievement. Even academics, so often contemptuous of historical novels, have come to respect her comprehensive research and her exactness with documented history. I wish this were not the end.

Sunday Telegraph

Powerful, almost operatic. The conclusion of a great work. The publication of Gemini completes an ambitious literary circle.

The Times Literary Supplement

Mistress of several languages, both ancient and modern, and of many literatures and philosophies, Dunnett produces writing that is informed, formal and flawless. Opulent descriptions, witty repartee, gripping duels and battle scenes, ebullient practical jokes, and smoldering sexuality crowd the chapters with a life so full of color and intensity that it leaps off the pages.

The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

Dorothy Dunnett, historical novelist extraordinaire. Witty, urbane, observant. The best writer in the genre since Sir Walter Scott.

Sunday Times (London)

A stunning finale. There are plots and counterplots, terrific fights, hairbreadth escapes and rescues and daring cliffhangers. The suspense and excitement amount to a breathless pitch of tension. With their obliquity of references, allusions, veiled hints and sudden revelations, her books are sophisticated, closely woven gems. Elegant, scholarly, witty and fully crafted social novels, they are enhanced by Dunnetts acute observation, basic common sense and deep knowledge of human nature.

Journal Extra

Enthralling. Fans will be reluctant to let go.

Booklist

A series that will give us our fill of high Renaissance adventure and espionage. She strings every vivid incident on a rapturously solid sense of period.

The Guardian

Dunnetts gift lies in her ability to take historys bare bones and invest them with life. She does this by creating characters whose humor and pathos reach across centuries. Like a literary Pieter Breughel, she reproduces history in all its grime and glory. Her work exemplifies the best the genre can offer.

The Christian Science Monitor

Dunnett writes the most exciting historical novels around. [She is] one of the greatest tale-spinners since Dumas.

The Plain Dealer

Complex and ambitious. Throughout the series, Dunnett has maintained her consistency of vision, presenting the Renaissance in a multilayered collage, depicting in detail a world that in many ways set the stage for the onset of modernity in Europe. Readers are accustomed to seeing this degree of world-building in science fiction and fantasy. It is refreshing to find it in a work so grounded in actual events. Always immaculate in her research, brilliant in character descriptions, hers is a style second to none.

The Washington Post Book World

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