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Showing 1 - 15 of
15 matches in All Departments
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Silk (Paperback, Main - Canons)
Alessandro Baricco; Translated by Ann Goldstein
1
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R265
R212
Discovery Miles 2 120
Save R53 (20%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
An unforgettable fable about the brutality of war - and one girl's
quest for revenge and healing, from the author of the acclaimed
international bestseller "Silk."
When - in an unnamed place and time - Manuel Roca's enemies hunt
him down to kill him, they fail to discover Nina, his youngest
child, hidden in a hole beneath his farmhouse floor. After this
carnage Tito, one of the murderers, discovers Nina's trapdoor.
Enthralled by the sight of Nina's perfect innocence, he keeps
quiet. 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 a familiar old man selling newspapers in town
can we know what Nina will ultimately make of her brutal legacy.
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.
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Without Blood (Paperback, Main)
Alessandro Baricco; Translated by Ann Goldstein
2
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R287
R228
Discovery Miles 2 280
Save R59 (21%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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Ocean Sea (Paperback)
Alessandro Baricco
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R480
R422
Discovery Miles 4 220
Save R58 (12%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"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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