The Sea of Jacob by T.M. Vance

Venice held out for seventeen months. This is the story of the officer sent to starve her. March 1848. The Austrian Empire is coming apart. In a single night, two hundred and forty-eight men walk off the deck of an Imperial corvette in Venice harbour and go over to the new Republic of San Marco — and Mattia Corso, a young officer from Trieste, is the man holding the lantern at the gangway as they go. He does not go with them. Eighteen months later he is commanding a gunboat in the northern channels of the lagoon, blockading a city where his own family's flour is being smuggled in by night, where the friend he let escape over the stern is now serving a gun on the other side, and where a clerk of the Republic named Livia Grimani has begun building a list with his name on it. Between them stands a dead man's secret: a file assembled in Trieste in 1804 that destroyed one man's life, and that was held together — as the best lies always are — by a single honest witness who could not read what he swore. As the batteries close in, as cholera and hunger do what artillery cannot, both of them are forced toward the same question. When a state decides who its enemies were, it decides on paper. Who writes the paper? A novel of divided loyalty, buried debt, and the long price of a father's silence, set during one of the great forgotten sieges of the nineteenth century. The Sea of Jacob is a standalone novel set in the world of The Sea of Esau.