Alessandro Baricco Books In Order

Novels

  1. Silk (1997)
  2. City (1999)
  3. Ocean Sea (1999)
  4. Lands of Glass (2002)
  5. Without Blood (2004)
  6. An Iliad (2006)
  7. Emmaus (2012)
  8. Mr Gwyn (2014)
  9. The Young Bride (2016)

Collections

  1. Stories Upon Stories (2016)

Plays

  1. Novecento (2020)

Novellas

  1. The Story of Don Juan (2016)

Non fiction

  1. The Barbarians (2014)
  2. The Game (2020)

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Alessandro Baricco Books Overview

Silk

France, 1861. When an epidemic threatens to wipe out the silk trade in France, Herve Joncour, a young silk breeder, has to travel overland to distant Japan, out of bounds to foreigners, to smuggle out healthy silkworms. In the course of his secret negotiations with the local baron, Joncour’s attention is arrested by the man’s concubine, a girl who does not have oriental eyes. Although they are unable to exchange so much as a word, love blossoms between them, a love that is conveyed in a number of recondite messages. How their secret affair develops is told in this remarkable love story. As haunting as a strain of passionate music, Silk is an enchantment, an exquisite narrative and a stylistic tour de force.

City

From the author of the international bestseller Silk A riveting, lyrical love story Alan Cheuse, NPR and the acclaimed Ocean Sea Astonishing…
vividly erotic Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times comes an entirely new species of fiction: a panoramic Cartesian comic book of a novel with superheroes, boxers, cowboys, and one bed wetting prodigy expected to win the Nobel Prize. Baricco’s wildly inventive story, set in the United States, describes the improbable relationship between two untethered souls: Gould, a thirteen year old genius, and Shatzy Shell, his thirtysomething governess. Except for each other, they abide beyond human connection, each in a private world of serial imagination: in Shatzy s case, the violent Wild West show she has been improvising into a tape recorder since the age of six; in Gould s, the mock heroic tale of an underdog boxer, which the boy tells to his imaginary friends, a giant and a mute. With the narrative logic of a comic strip, City s quicksilver prose flows unpredictably between the whimsy of childhood conjuring and the serpentine realm of metaphysics, cunningly reminding us how the imaginings of children can harbor the stuff of tragedy, while the grandest ideas of adults are often strictly for kids. By turns hilarious and deeply sad, City is an American original, penned by a brilliant Italian.

Ocean Sea

‘Exotic…
erotic…
Ocean Sea is highly romantic and breathtakingly lyrical.’ The New York Times Book ReviewWith 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.

Without Blood

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.

An Iliad

A bold reimagining of our civilization’s greatest tale of war, by the author of the acclaimed best seller Silk. Alessandro Baricco re creates the siege of Troy through the voices of twenty one Homeric characters in the narrative idiom of our modern imagination. Sacrificing none of Homer s panoramic scope, Baricco forgoes Homeric 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 almost three thousand 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 clamor of 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 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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