OCEAN SEA PB – ALESSANDRO BARICCO-ALASTAIR MCEWEN

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.