From the author of the international bestseller Silk ("Vividly erotic" -- Los Angeles Times; "A heartbreaking love story . . . a literary gem of bewitching power" -- The Sunday Times [London]), comes a haunting, suspenseful tale of love and vengeance.

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 fulfillment of his obsessive secret purpose -- to answer murder with murder -- can conclude the journey that has brought him from the ends of the earth. At once playful and profoundly serious, Alessandro Baricco's new novel surges with the hypnotic power of the ocean sea.

Alessandro Baricco was born in Turin in 1958. His novels have won many literary prizes, including the Prix Medicis in France, and the Campiello, Viareggio, and Palazzo del Bosco prizes in Italy. He has also written works in the field of musicology. He is highly regarded in Italy as a television commentator on opera and literature.