In The Floating Book, love, lust, and the written word embrace in a larger-than-life historical orgy. The major action takes place in Venice in 1468, as the first German artisans arrive with Gutenberg's printing innovations. But prologues to each section flash back to six decades before Christ, when the Roman poet Catullus was penning sensual verses to his muse, the promiscuous, aristocratic Clodia. The connection between these events, a millennium and a half apart, are Catullus' scandalous poems. Printer Wendelin von Speyer, a maker of what the Venetians call "quick books" (as opposed to labor-intensive hand-copied manuscripts), ponders an edition of the recently discovered Latin verses. His native-born wife, Lussièta, has the fantastical, superstitious, story-loving personality of her city, and her attempts to help her pragmatic husband navigate his adopted homeland often backfire. Undermining their perfect romance is the calculating, damaged Jewish courtesan Sosia, who collects Venice's upper-class and merchant men without regard for her husband, a kind-hearted but elderly doctor. Michelle Lovric, a classicist and collector of women's letters, plays to her strengths in her first novel; her epistolatory sections are by far her most vigorous work. Lovric sends her characters into foreign lands and has them write letters back home, translating the strange sights, customs, climates, and emotions for their relatives. Catullus describes the momentous meeting of Rome's decadence and his own young ambition to his brother, fighting in distant Asia Minor. Lussièta's diary recounts her arduous journey over the Alps to Germany, as her husband bore his brother back to his hometown for burial. Wendelin writes tragically misunderstood love letters to his wife, and also sends letters about Venice to his father, for whom the city's fluid, cosmopolitan charms seem like the devil's work. Lovric's plot involves an ancient curse, mysterious plagues, a bordello nunnery, mer-babies, and witchcraft. She imagines Venice as a place between solid ground and shifting sea, where anything can become real if enough people believe in it. Her one miscalculation is believing that Sosia belongs among her major characters, worthy of pages of story and backstory at a time; the prostitute's lack of self-awareness makes her far less compelling than the other personalities, who live half through books and half through thoughts arranged for others to view, interior narratives that read like books in the making. But Lovric's meticulous research, revealed in her gift for imagery and the letters' and diaries' details, can light The Floating Book's pages on fire. The title refers to one of the most beautiful of those images: Wendelin and Lussièta, poling a boat away from the city, baptizing Wendelin's first printing of Catullus by floating it out to sea.