Volcano Lover

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. Her non-fiction works include On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others and At the Same Time. She was also the author of four novels, including The Volcano Lover and In America, as well as a collection of stories and several plays. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, and received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.

'A panoramic, passionately feminist examination of the changing shape of Western civilisation since the Age of Enlightenment. Sontag's book is a sweeping, exquisitely detailed picture of Europe in the final decades of the eighteenth century.' Chicago Sun-Times 'The Volcano Lover seems a novel Susan Sontag was destined to write, a shift from the moral intelligence of the essayist to the intelligent heart of the novelist.' The Nation