Books by Alessandro Baricco
Silk
The year is 1861. Hervé Joncour is a French merchant of silkworms, who combs the known world for their gemlike eggs. Then circumstances compel him to travel farther, beyond the edge of the known, to a country legendary for the quality of its silk and its hostility to foreigners: Japan.There Joncour meets a woman. They do not touch; they do not even speak. And he cannot read the note she sends him until he has returned to his own country. But in the moment he does, Joncour is possessed.
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Silk
This startling, sensual, hypnotically compelling novel tells a story of adventure, sexual enthrallment, and a love so powerful that it unhinges a man's life. In 1861 French silkworm merchant Hervé Joncour is compelled to travel to Japan, where, in the court of an enigmatic nobleman, he meets a woman. They do not touch; they do not even speak. And he cannot read the note she sends him until he has returned to his country. But in the moment he does, Joncour is possessed. The same spell will envelop anyone who reads Silk, a work that has the compression of a fable, the evocative detail of the greatest historical fiction, and the devastating erotic force of a dream.
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An Iliad (Vintage International)
A bold re-imagining of our civilization’s greatest tale of war, from the acclaimed and bestselling author of Silk.
In An Iliad, Alessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of twenty-one Homeric characters, in the narrative idiom of our modern imagination. From the return of Chryseis to the burial of Hector, we see through human eyes and feel with human hearts the unforgettable events first recounted almost three thousand years ago. Imbuing the stuff of legend with a startling new relevancy and humanity, Baricco gives us The Iliad as we have never known it. His transformative achievement is certain to delight and fascinate all readers of Homer’s indispensable classic.
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Ocean Sea
by Alastair McEwen, Alessandro Baricco
"Exotic...erotic... Ocean Sea is highly romantic and breathtakingly lyrical."--The New York Times Book Review
With Silk, his first novel to appear in English, Alessandro Baricco immediately proved himself to be a magical storyteller. With Ocean Sea, he has been acclaimed as the successor to Italo Calvino, and a major voice in modern literature.
In Ocean Sea, Alessandro Baricco presents a hypnotizing postmodern fable of human malady--psychological, existential, erotic--and the sea as a means of deliverance. At the Almayer Inn, a remote shoreline hotel, an artist dips his brush in a cup of ocean water to paint a portrait of the sea. A scientist pens love letters to a woman he has yet to meet. An adulteress searches for relief from her proclivity to fall in love. And a sixteen-year-old girl seeks a cure from a mysterious condition which science has failed to remedy. When these people meet, their fates begin to interact as if by design. Enter a mighty tempest and a ghostly mariner with a thirst for vengeance, and the Inn becomes a place where destiny and desire battle for the upper hand. Playful, provocative, and ultimately profound, Ocean Sea is a novel of striking originality and wisdom.
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Without Blood
From the author of the acclaimed international best-seller Silk, here is an unforgettable tale of the cruelty of war, a little girl’s shattered world, and her lifelong quest for revenge and healing.
When—in an unnamed place and time—Manuel Roca’s enemies hunt him down, they fail to discover Nina, his youngest child, hidden in a hole beneath his farmhouse floor. And so, doing just as her father instructed, she neither speaks nor stirs as he is viciously slain above her hiding place. Only after this carnage will one of the murderers discover Nina’s trapdoor. But Tito, a mere boy himself, is so enthralled by the sight of Nina’s perfect innocence that he says nothing to his accomplices.
By the time she has grown up, Nina’s innocence will have bloomed into something else altogether, and one by one the wartime hunters will become the peacetime hunted. But not until a striking old woman calls upon an old man selling newspapers in town—the old man Tito has become—can we know what Nina will ultimately make of her brutal legacy. With the indelible truth of a fable, Without Blood reminds us that all wars are the same—the same mistake infinitely repeated in the hearts and deeds of wronged men and women—and that no life can remain untouched by loss or by hope.
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The Young Bride: A Novel
A young woman enters a fantastically strange family in this “luminous and alarming lesson on desire” by the international-bestselling author (La Stampa, Italy).
A young woman is promised to the scion of a noble family. While her betrothed is away traveling, she is sent to the family’s villa to make her marriage preparations. There, the woman discovers that her future in-laws fear the coming of night, each and every night, and seem to never sleep. As the days pass, the atmosphere turns increasingly surreal, and the young bride’s interactions with the family turn increasingly erotic.
In this “virtuoso literary performance,” Alessandro Baricco portrays a cast of mysterious characters who exist outside of the normal rules of causation.
The Young Bride is an adult fable about fate, otherness, and the author’s own act of creation (European Literature Network).
“Baricco spins it all together into a work of elegance, eroticism and playful make-believe.”―The Wall Street Journal
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Emmaus
The secular and the pious. The rich and the poor. Those with a capacity for destiny” and those who cannot afford it.” Emmaus is a world of stark contrasts, one in which four young menall from proud, struggling families, and all lusting after Andre, a hyper- sexual womanare goaded from adolescence to manhood in a torrent of exploits and crises, sexual awakenings and morbid depressions, naivety and fatalism.
A brilliant portrait of the perils and uncertainties of youth and faith, Emmaus is a remarkable novel from one of the very best writers in Europe.
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Emmaus
Four teenage boys stand on a bridge in the rain, staring down at a fast-flowing river. They're not talking; they're all thinking about the beautiful and enigmatic Andreonly a few months before, she had piled on every piece of clothing she owned and jumped into the black water below. Since then, the boys have been obsessed with the girl who tried to kill herselfthe girl who takes men one after another into the bathroom of the local cinema, and who is forcing these devout Catholic boys to question everything they know about devotion, desire, and sin.
A haunting novel from one of the masters of contemporary European fiction, Emmaus brilliantly evokes the perils and uncertainties of youth.
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Mr. Gwyn
After celebrated author Jasper Gwyn suddenly and publicly announces that he will never write another book, he embarks on a strange new career path as a copyist,” holding thirty-day sittings in a meticulously appointed room and producing, at the end, brief but profoundly rich portraits in prose. The surprising, beautiful, and even frightening results are received with rapture by their subjectsamong them Gwyn’s devoted assistant, Rebecca; a beautiful fabric importer; a landscape painter; Gwyn’s own literary agent; two wealthy newlyweds; a tailor to the Queen; and a very dangerous nineteen-year-old.
Then Gwyn disappears, leaving behind only a short note to his assistantand the portraits. As Rebecca studies his words, she realizes that the mystery is larger than the simple fact of Gwyn’s whereabouts, and she begins to unravel a lifetime’s worth of clues left by a man who saw so much but said so little, a man whose solitude masked a heart as hungry as hers.
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Stories Upon Stories
by Umberto Eco, Dave Eggers, Yiyun Li, Alessandro Baricco, Abraham Yehoshua
Stories Upon Stories is an epic re-imagining of ten classic tales: Dave Eggers rewrites Jules Verne’s rollicking Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” Ali Smith reconceives Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone,” Umberto Eco reimagines the mind-bending Italian classic The Betrothed,” along with seven more equally inspired pairings of timeless masterpieces with contemporary literary masters. Featuring breathtakingly original illustrations on every page, and bound as lavishly as a textbook worthy of Hogwarts, this book will spark the imaginations of children and adults alike.
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