Historical fiction has a habit, when push comes to shove, of discarding facts in pursuit of drama. What distinguishes and elevates to the first order Sarah Dunant’s series of five novels set in Renaissance Italy is that she combines flawless historical scholarship with beguiling storytelling. Her latest takes two names we feel we know too much about already – Lucrezia Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli – and builds around them a narrative that sings, set at the beginning of the 16th century, where their reputations for, respectively, amoral scheming and ruthless statecraft are refashioned into something both truer to the facts and all the more compelling for it. And as the Borgia family, headed by the dangerous, absurd patriarch Pope Alexander VI, seizes power with the express purpose of making itself great, Dunant is sensitive to contemporary echoes and so offers into the bargain a lesson from history for our divided age.

• In the Name of the Family by Sarah Dunant is published by Little, Brown (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99