In the most beautiful city in the world, a young man leaps to his death. Though hundreds witness the event, no one moves to help him . . .

On January 22, 2017, twenty-two-year-old Gambian refugee Pateh Sabally arrived by train in Venice, set down his backpack, and plunged into the cold waters of the Grand Canal while hundreds looked on. As Sabally drowned, some people actually hurled insults at him. Outraged by this tragic death, the novel’s narrator, a young writer living in France, investigates Pateh’s trail, aiming to understand the sequence of events that led up to such a tragic act.

Venice Requiem tells the story of a city where literature grapples with the pressing dramas of our time. Throughout the novel, the narrator quotes authors who lived in or wrote about Venice: Goldoni, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Lord Byron, Marcel Proust, and others. Through a dialogue with the writings and experiences of these authors, the novel explores the potential of literature to rescue humanity.