Ocean Sea
“The sea, as the Baron saw from the geographer's charts, was far away. But above all – he saw in his dreams – it was terrible, exaggeratedly beautiful, terribly powerful, inhuman and inmical: marvellous.”
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An acclaimed and haunting tale of love and vengeance - from the author of the bestselling Silk
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. Adams may furnish the key to the girl’s salvation, but only the fulfilment of his obsessive secret purpose - to answer murder with murder - can conclude the journey that has brought him from the ends of the earth. Alternately playful and profoundly serious, Baricco’s novel surges with the hypnotic power of the ocean sea.
“Highly romantic and breathtakingly lyrical”
new York Times Book Review
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“Compelling, profound and sharply funny”
Stephanie Merritt
observer
“Baricco has produced a beguilingly unusual beach book”
the Times
“Baricco has produced a work of miraculously spun sugar, at which many people will gasp in admiration”
spectator
“This is a novel driven by the pleasure of narrative. Unburdened by a single perspective, the writing is ethereal”
telegraph
Alessandro Baricco was born in Turin in 1958. He is the author of thirteen novels, as well as a number of essay and short story collections, a modern rendition of The Iliad and a theatrical monologue. He has won the Prix Médicis Étranger in France and the Selezione Campiello, Viareggio and Palazzo al Bosco prizes in Italy.