The Puffin

In 1817 Venice, a disfigured spy pining for a local milliner has his vigil interrupted by the surreal arrival of a puffin at the Rialto Market.

A dazzling tale of passion and resistance – told with heart, wit and feathers.

Venice, 1817. A disfigured traitor. A revolutionary milliner. A sadistic assassin. A poet. And a puffin. When a fingerless nobleman seizes a puffin that arrives mysteriously at the Rialto Market, he triggers a cascade of events that will embroil all the central characters.

The puffin’s fervid character and his matrimonial tragedies put the bird on a collision course with the worst and best of humanity. Alva the milliner fights for freedom from Venice’s Habsburg occupiers. Her brother Favaloro smuggles cod and sedition from the Lofoten Islands. Brother and sister join the revolutionary sect of the Carbonari, plotting to ransom a Habsburg princess. And both fall in love with Tommaso, who walks with a crutch but whose poetry overthrows hearts.

Betrayals shatter all their plans and desires. Tommaso falls prey to a ruthless seducer. Alva must sacrifice herself to save Favaloro. As the Habsburgs send the poet to the scaffold, the puffin’s fate hangs in the balance and the assassin’s identity is shockingly revealed.

Michelle Lovric is a novelist, poet and environmentalist who lives in London and Venice. Her work explores the history of medicine, trauma and art, with Venice as both protagonist and setting. Her adult fiction includes The Remedy, longlisted for the Women’s Prize. Although it stands completely alone, The Puffin takes off where the author’s acclaimed novel The Book of Human Skin ends and welcomes back its most memorable character.

A genre-defying literary epic fusing the politics of coercion and surrender with the fire of resistance – set in a vividly imagined 19th-century Venice. Featuring a cast of unforgettable characters – not all of them human – this novel explores love, faith, language and consciousness with lyricism and midnight-black humour.

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