Venice Requiem
Khalid Lyamlahy author Ros Schwartz translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:HopeRoad Publishing Ltd
Published:5th Feb '26
Should be back in stock very soon
From the publisher of, SMALL BOAT comes VENICE REQUIEM: Based on a true story.
On the 22nd of January 2017, Pateh Sabally, a twenty-two-year-old Gambian refugee living in Italy since 2015, arrives in Venice from Milan. He leaves his backpack near the Scalzi Bridge, puts his train ticket and residence permit 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 "Africa". 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 leading up to his death. Venice Requiem tells the story of a Venice 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.
"A profoundly poetic novel." - Tel Quel
"An ambitious and poignant second novel, inviting the reader to navigate against the current in the Grand Canal of Venice." - Zone Critique
"How to mourn a person you don't know? ... Khalid Lyamlahy, with sublime audacity, accomplishes this feat. His novel, strong, poetic, captivating, gives a dignified burial to Pateh Sabally." - Jeune Afrique
"It is also the victory of writing over silence and its abyss, depicted by the Moroccan Khalid Lyamlahy in a novel as inventive as it is poetic." - RFI
"A vibrant and poetic tribute to all African migrants. A necessary book." - Jury of the Alain Spiess Second Novel Prize.
"Khalid Lyamlahy begins his beautiful and heartbreaking Venice Requiem with a dedication: “In memory of Africans who died far from home, buried in silence and oblivion.” Based on the true story of a 22-year-old Gambian refugee who threw himself into Venice’s Grand Canal, Lyamlahy revives the countless faceless migrants who lose their lives each year crossing the sea, but also those who experience the terrible loneliness of exile. Thanks to Lyamlahy’s reserved and sensitive prose, in an equally graceful translation by Ros Schwartz, we are reminded of our fellow beings all around us and the dangers of erasure." - Olivia Snaije
‘Venice Requiem is a beautiful, heartfelt and heart wrenching book which shows the utmost respect for its subject and for all African refugees who have lost their lives’ -BookBlast
Lyamlahy demands that we stop looking at the architecture, long enough to see the human being struggling for breath in the canal. The city may be sinking, but it is the indifference of Europe that is truly hitting bottom.' - *Zimmer *
'Khalid Lyamlahy's Venice Requiem, a meditation on the death of an African migrant in the waters of a storied European city moved me with its fragmentary, dreamlike prose. Paying tribute and attention to lives lived and lost without memorial, this slim book insists the reader grapple with all that is hidden by the canals and lagoons of Venice. I'm still thinking about it.' - Diana McCaulay, author of Gone to Drift
'Lyrical and harrowing, Venice Requiem is an urgently contemporary and deeply human meditation on exile and loss. Lyamlahy’s prose, in Schwartz’s luminous translation, both haunts and captivates. More than a requiem, this book is a reckoning—a reminder of literature’s enduring power to save us from ourselves.' - Professor Doyle D. Calhoun
'Fluently translated [...] with so many implications for morality and culture both in Europe and beyond' -Morning Star
ISBN: 9781913109387
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown