In the sticky summer heat unruly desires stir the blood ...For Catullus, the brilliantly witty and outrageous young poet, and Clodia, his older, married lover, a borrowed villa in Rome is a secret, illicit meeting-place. When they are apart, Catullus burns with desire for 'his girl', while Clodia goes her own way among his rivals. Other passions simmer in the heat: the streets threaten to erupt in political violence, hearts sour and contemplate murder, and love and hate are dangerously entwined. Catullus' jealousy grows as toxic as hellebore or hemlock. Poisoning is a Roman art, and there is poison everywhere ...

In the sticky summer heat unruly desires stir the blood ...For Catullus, the brilliantly witty and outrageous young poet, and Clodia, his older, married lover, a borrowed villa in Rome is a secret, illicit meeting-place. When they are apart, Catullus burns with desire for 'his girl', while Clodia goes her own way among his rivals. Other passions simmer in the heat: the streets threaten to erupt in political violence, hearts sour and contemplate murder, and love and hate are dangerously entwined. Catullus' jealousy grows as toxic as hellebore or hemlock. Poisoning is a Roman art, and there is poison everywhere ...

'She reels you in with a return to the seductive, flowing prose that has made all her novels...so memorable...Dunmore has a gift for turning every genre she touches to gold...a captivating tale of forbidden love with a bittersweet finale' Telegraph

`Dunmore at her most innovative and daring...a powerful and convincing study of fame and notoriety...captivating and compelling' Time Out

`Compelling...Dunmore's strengths as a novelist have always included her skill in sensuous description and her ability to convey the promises and the dangers of erotic love. The Rome she has so vividly realised in Counting the Stars provides a new stage on which to display those strengths' Sunday Times

"Surely Rome is enough to fill a life, if he can just get free of this obsession that has robbed everything of meaning except itself.

But she'll always be there. He won't be able to escape her. Even if he can stop meeting her he'll never be able to avoid hearing about her. Their circle is too small an island in the sea of Rome. Her name will follow him everywhere. She's in his blood...

Clodia, I'm talking to you. Listen. Love and hate, that's what I feel for you, love and hate so fused together that I can't drag one from the arms of the other. You want to know how that's possible? You say it doesn't make sense? You're right. There is no sense left in me: only sensation. Feeling tears me apart."

Helen Dunmore has published ten novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby; House of Orphans and Counting the Stars. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer.