Venice Requiem

Winner of the 2024 Prix Ethiophile

In the most beautiful city in the world, a young man leaps to his death. Though hundreds witness the event, none know him, and none move to help him.

On the 22nd of January 2017, twenty-two-year-old Gambian refugee  Pateh Sabally arrives by train in Venice. He leaves his backpack near the Scalzi Bridge, his train ticket and residence permit carefully tucked away in a plastic pouch, and then plunges into the cold waters of the Grand Canal amidst the gaze of onlookers and tourists. As he drowns, some insult him, while others shout angrily. Outraged by this tragic death, the novel’s narrator, a young writer based in Paris, follows Pateh’s trail, aiming to piece together and understand the sequence of events that led up to his death.

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.