HISTORICAL NOVEL? OR ONE OF THE MOST ASTOUNDING AUTOBIOGRAPHIES EVER WRITTEN? The memories of a wanderer in the stormy and licentious era of Renaissance Italy... Carola, the illegitimate child of an Italian nobleman, spent her childhood in a castle near Perugia until the day Fortune cast her into the hostile outer-world of 16th-century Italy. As a member of a group of strolling players, Carola was to gather both harsh experience and gentle wisdom from the strong man Bernard, from the harlot Lucia, from the hunchback-jester Petruchio, and from Sofia, who would be burned as a witch. Finally, when she finds her long-sought peace in love, the freedom she has won carries her triumphantly beyond the barrier of death and from her Life As Carola. “Here is an unusual book that shines with fire...that is packed with incident, that is vivid, dramatic and skillfully put together—and yet one that this reviewer finds harder to value correctly than any that has ever fallen into his hands.”—New York Times “During the last twenty years, seven books of mine have been published as historical novels which to me are biographies of previous lives I have known.”—Joan Grant, from her autobiography Far Memory