A new biography of Dante that follows his life through the turbulent world of the  late middle ages. This evocative and richly researched narrative traces the events which transformed an intense, self-obsessed teenage poet into the author of the first novel.

Exiled and under sentence of death, Dante wrote a fictional account of a cosmic journey which weaved connections between the intense love he felt inside him, the cruelty he saw around him and the force that drives the universe. The resulting book, the Divine Comedy, has been in print ever since printing and it is a work of breathtaking, cinematic imagination.

Dante’s Invention shows how Dante dramatised the worst and the best of his own age in a tale which will resonate for anyone who has ever had the feeling that the world might have gone astray.