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.

Praise for Venice Requiem

‘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

‘Venice is usually sold to us as a postcard: light on stone, gondolas, romance, theatre. Venice Requiem tears that postcard in half and asks what remains when a city’s beauty becomes the backdrop to a death — and when that death is quietly folded into the churn of “everyday tragedy.”’ - LITRO Magazine

‘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

‘This lyrical story of Pateh Sabally, a 22 year old Gambian, who plunged to death in Venice’s beautiful Grand Canal, is a many layered look at European morality and culture. Moroccan Khalid Lyamlahy brings Pateh to life through the eyes and emotions of a young french writer who dreams to link Venice and Gambia’s Banjul, cities unknown to him, in re-imagining the 5761 kilometre journey of Pateh, his own imagined friend. After his death, looking into the water, the young writer tells Pateh, “Your bequest to Venice: a cracked mirror in which the entire world can see its smugness reflected.”’ - Victoria Brittain

'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

‘A profoundly poetic novel’ - Tel Quel

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 

'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

‘An ambitious and poignant second novel, inviting the reader to navigate against the current in the Grand Canal of Venice’ -Pauline de Toffoli, 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’- Elgas, Jeune Afrique

‘Khalid Lyamlahy continues the exploration of the memorial materials of exile in a novel full of questioning’ - Catherine Mazauric, En Attendant Nadeau

‘A short text that is terribly moving’ - Gladys Marivat, Le Monde

‘An original and poetic narrative’ - Christiane Chaulet Achour, Diacritik

‘This novel is a refusal of immediacy, of the lightness of the treatment of information imposed on us by social networks’- Réassi Ouabonzi, Chroniques littéraires Africaines

‘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’ -Tirthankar Chanda, RFI

‘A vibrant and poetic tribute to all African migrants. A necessary book.’ - Jury of the Alain Spiess Second Novel Prize