What the Marangona Heard

About this book

Venice, 14 July 1902. At 9:47 in the morning the great bell tower of St Mark's begins to fall, and within minutes it is a hill of brick dust. Only one of its five bells, the Marangona, survives whole. Orsola Bortolin, a forty-eight-year-old piano tuner, knows what the city does not: bronze remembers every hour it has rung, and broken bells are leaking four centuries of Venice into the air. As the last of a secret confraternity of listeners, she can gather those hours, but every one she takes pushes out a memory of her own, and she is already losing her drowned daughter's face. She cannot do it alone. The only other listener she can find is Teresa Zennaro, eighteen, a sharp-tongued sack-stitcher from the Stucky flour mill who would rather hear the future. The new tower will take ten years to rise. What will they save, and who will they become?