The Viper of Milan

Marjorie Bowen was sixteen when she wrote this, and publishers turned it down for years before it appeared in 1906 and made her reputation overnight. Set in fourteenth century Lombardy, it takes Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the Duke of Milan whose cruelty gives the book its title, and refuses to soften him. Against him stands Mastino della Scala of Verona, fighting a war he is losing, while Visconti’s sister Valentine and a pair of young travellers, Tomaso and Vittore, get pulled into the wreckage. The prose is hard and unsentimental, and Graham Greene said this was the novel that showed him he could be a writer. Read it here as a free PDF and EPUB.