Amid the turmoil of war and destruction in eighteenth-century Europe, three artists were trying to make sense of rapid change, of ruination: Tiepolo, Piranesi and – particularly – Goya. They are joined, from the margins, by a strange figure – a refugee, an observer, an idiot savant, a Pulcinella, a Fool or Trickster. Nell is another outsider, there on the edge; another loner or non-conformist, whose mutability seems to ensure his survival in a shifting world.

A multi-voiced hybrid, Days of Drowning is a new way of telling a story. A prose narrative with the dense music of poetry, an historical novel, an examination of the central importance of art and culture, particularly in times of social and political upheaval. It is also a book about ageing, a story of pandemics, wars and revolutions, dynasties and dictators, power and corruption and social collapse that speaks to our current moment.

Set in the latter half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, the novel’s turbulent backdrop is the decline and fall of the Venetian Empire, the convulsions of the French Revolution and the disintegration of Spain: war and destruction throughout Europe – displacement, plague and famine. Each artist finds different ways to examine this world of power, moral and social dissolution, the barbarism of war – to bear witness.