Life in New York is good for Claudia Matthias. Now a beautiful, successful journalist there, she's turned her back on the passionate failures and grief of adolescent life in Venice - a decaying city, she claims, in a dying lagoon.But news of the tragedy overtaking her adored artist father drives her home. It's time to return to her dysfunctional family and come to terms with where she really belongs. The voyage of self-discovery is painful; along the way she must learn humility, trust and true love. Not least, there's Venice to be reckoned with - fragile, more threatened than ever, yet still incomparably beautiful; the old seawitch city where nothing is ever quite what it seems.