From the highly acclaimed Dutch writer Margriet de Moor, an extremely sensitive and sensual recreation of 18th Century Naples. For one entire opera season, Carlotta sits in her candle-lit box held in the spell of a world in which knowledge, beauty and love collide: music. She is falling in love with the castrati, Gasparo. Set in eighteenth-century Naples, a place of carriages, churches visited by criminals, and ships resting in dusky harbors, The Virtuoso is the tale of an exceptional place and an exceptional passion. A bestseller throughout Europe, The Virtuoso is both a wonderfully romantic historical novel and a literary triumph. With this very unusual love story, her first publication in the United States, Margriet de Moor is sure to attract a great many American readers. "Margriet de Moor"s virtuoso novel meets exactly the taste of our own time for the bizarre made sympathetic, the beautiful seen as the technical. . . De Moor--formerly a singer--describes Gasparo"s singing, his swoony effect on his audiences and his lady"s delight in his naked body with rhapsodically expert relish."--Sunday Times (London) "The rapturous verve in de Moor"s style is fueled by a swirl of period details which, for once in a novel of this kind, are neither mere set-dressing nor too patently the results of background research."--Times Literary Supplement