In 1861 French silkworm merchant Herve Joncour travels to Japan, where he encounters the mysterious Hara Kei. He develops a painful longing for Kei's beautiful concubine - but they cannot touch; they don't even speak. And he cannot read the note she sends him until he has returned to his own country. But the moment he does, Joncour is enslaved. Subtle, tender and surprising, Silk is an evocative tale of erotic possession.

A handful of disparate lives converge at a remote seaside inn: a lovelorn professor, a renowned painter, an inscrutable seductress - and a beautiful young girl, fatally ill, brought to the sea by a desperate father's last hope. An intricate web of destinies and associations begins to reveal itself, but it is not until the arrival of a mysterious sailor called Adams that the truth in all its dreamlike beauty and cruelty becomes clear. Alternately playful and profoundly serious, Baricco's novel surges with the hypnotic power of the ocean sea.

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.

Alessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of 21 Homeric characters. Sacrificing none of Homer's panoramic scope, Baricco forgoes Homer's detachment and admits us to realms of subjective experience his predecessor never explored. 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 more than 3,000 years ago events arranged not by the whims of the gods in this instance but by the dictates of human nature. With Andromache, Patroclus, Priam, and the rest, we are privy to the ghastly confusion of battle, the clamour of the princely councils, the intimacies of the bedchamber until finally only a blind poet is left to recount secondhand the awful fall of Ilium. Imbuing the stuff of legend with a startlingly 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 the readers of Homer's indispensable classic.

Without Blood begins with a shocking, visceral act of violence - the assassination of a man and his family. Only the daughter, Nina, survives, thanks to an extraordinary act of mercy by one of the attackers. Nina is just four years old. Decades later Nina hunts down the last of her family's murderers, the man who was her saviour. Their reunion brings about a profound reappraisal of their lives and what took place on that fateful night over half a century earlier. Highly visual and unforgettably sad, Without Blood is a haunting book about damage, longing, memory and forgiveness. Ann Goldstein's superb translation captures Baricco's effortless prose style and gives readers in Britain the opportunity to experience this gem of a novel that has already delighted hundreds of thousands across Europe.

"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.