Venice, 1919. In the aftermath of the First World War, Hugh Thurne, a senior British diplomat involved in the peace negotiations, decides to flee to his second home in Venice rather than return to his wife and the charade of his marriage in London. Although profoundly disturbed about the long-term prospects for peace, he has faith in the city’s power to raise his spirits.

Hugh earnestly looks forward to visiting with his old friends Giacomo and Valentina Venier in their dilapidated palazzo on the Grand Canal and to talking with Giacomo about the victory and the delicate agreement holding Europe together. He looks forward as well to renewing his affair with Emanuela, a young opera singer reminiscent of a Tiepolo beauty, and to the arrival of Violet Mancroft, the widow of Hugh’s best friend who was lost in the war. What he does not anticipate is the shadow lying over the Venier’s family future. Nor has he reckoned with the vagaries of his own heart. By the Grand Canal is a novel about empires and their crises, the desolation and hope that followed the war to end all wars, about death, time, memory, and innocent, as well as not so innocent love.

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