Hell Is Empty - And All the Devils Are Here! By Gerhard Roth; Translated by Todd C. Hanlin

Emil Lanz, an Austrian translator living in Venice, suffers a mid-life crisis and is about to commit suicide when he witnesses a murder. Mobsters burn his house and threaten his life, but he fights back and, in turn, kills two of his pursuers. Though he survives, his previous routine is destroyed . . . then rebuilt, thanks to an eccentric billionaire. He frequently questions the evolving situation: Is it a new reality? A consequence of his suicide that has transported him to a new dimension, to an afterlife? Or has he gone mad and is now in an insane asylum?

"If Venice actually sank one day [...], a rough plan of the vanished cluster of islands could be drawn up with the help of Roth's almost cartographically based Venice novels." Profil

"A mixture of amazing coincidences, tourist interest and criminal mystery." Oberösterreichisches Volksblatt

"One of the greatest pleasures of the moment is to walk through Venice and see the cruel and beautiful in these three books." Kurier

Author Gerhard Roth was born in Graz in 1942, the son of a medical doctor and a nurse. He originally intended to study medicine, but soon discontinued his studies. For ten years Roth worked as a computer programmer to support his growing family, but since the mid-1970s he has been exclusively a writer. His major works consist of a cycle of seven novels, Die Archive des Schweigens (The Archives of Silence), and another novel cycle, Orkus (Hades). His work has earned extensive critical acclaim over the years, including the Döblin Prize (1983), the Kreisky Prize (2002), and the Grand Austrian State Prize (2016), among many others.