Sacred Hearts
By Sarah Dunant
Virago £14.99, 471 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

Nun fiction may sound like an esoteric genre, yet it fulfils many of the traditional conditions of a novel: a closed environment beset by alliances and enmities, into which enters a single stranger.

Sacred Hearts, the third part of Sarah Dunant’s Renaissance trilogy, is a vivid and entertaining example of this form of historical fiction.

It is 1570 and the Italian convent of Santa Caterina is populated by the daughters of wealthy noblemen. But when 16-year-old Serafina enters the nunnery, the convent is racked by her cries as she rejects her fate. Guided by scholarly sister Zuana, Serafina becomes calmer but her new-found devotion and beautiful singing voice lifted in prayer disguise an unquiet heart.

Soon Serafina becomes the focus for warring factions: pious against pragmatic; a belief in miracles versus a belief in medicine; and those who love God versus those who love men – or one man in particular.