A Siren

Ravenna: a beautiful singer is found dead in the pine forest after Carnival, and the young marchese who was to marry someone else is arrested. Thomas Trollope was Anthony's elder brother and for a while the better known of the two — sixty books, most written in Florence, where his house was a station of the English literary world. The Italy here is his own, and the legal procedure is exact. Fifty-six plates, from Munch to Ballantyne, follow the arc of a life through ballrooms, kitchens and shorelines, matching the novel's passage from Carnival to grave.