Baricco, Alessandro: Without blood

Without Blood starts with a terrible act of violence - a vendetta to kill a man and his family. Only the daughter, Nina, survives. She is four. And she survives because of an extraordinary act of mercy. In the second section of the novel Nina is an old woman. She meets again her childhood saviour and the reunion brings about all sorts of reappraisals of their respective 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 longing, memory and forgiveness. Ann Goldstein's superb translation captures Baricco's effortless prose style and gives people in Britain the opportunity to experience this gem of a novel that has delighted hundreds of thousands of readers across Europe.