The Knife Maker of Venice

In 1604, Richard Sheriff and his sister Elizabeth are taken from Devon by slave raiders and separated. Richard’s skill as a blacksmith makes him valuable, but it also delivers him into servitude in Venice, where survival depends on craft, caution and his refusal to abandon the search for his sister.

The novel shifts Gilman’s historical fiction from the medieval battlefield to the early modern Mediterranean. Its context is a world of Barbary corsairs, slavery, Venetian workshops and maritime commerce, where a city famous for beauty and law can also be a marketplace for secrets, labour and human lives.