Download By the Grand Canal AudioBook Free
Hugh Thurne is a diplomat in love with a Venetian woman when his best friend's widow, Violet Mancroft, arrives in Venice from England. Violet continues to be absorbed by grief but she is also troubled by the direction her relationship with Hugh might now take. Violet is also preoccupied by anxiety on her behalf son, Robert, who may have fallen in love with Gloria Venier, a Grand Canal girl. Unlike Violet, Giacomo Venier is amused by his daughter's fledgling relationship - but he's dying, leaving his wife Valentina to keep up their dilapidated palace and face financial ruin, and bring up their teenage children alone. Through the English coast to Venice and Britain's dominions in the East, this is a novel about empires and their crises, about the desolation and the hope following the Great War, about death, time and memory, and innocent - and less innocent - love. Which is a separate study of the crisis of societies in peace and in war, and of the bewildering perversities of continually reawakening love.
