The Western Passage

In 1291 Genoa, the merchant Ugolino Vivaldi contracts two galleys to sail west toward India, a route no Christian ship has charted. Across ledgers and landfalls, his venture unfolds through the meticulous records of clerks and factors—the rope counted, the provisions weighed, the dead tallied—as the voyage deepens into a grim accumulation of silences and returns. Built on bureaucratic ritual and procedural detail, this historical novel traces how ambition and mathematics collide with an unknowable ocean, where the only certainty is the weight of what cannot be found.