The Apple in the Dark

'The best one', as Clarice herself described it – her great mystical masterpiece.

In the mistaken belief that he has killed his wife, Martim flees the city and arrives, in a state of both fear and wonder, at a remote ranch. There, he will have to remake himself, emerging from the beast-like state in which his crime has plunged him, to the fullness of a reinvented humanity. Along the way, he will mark the lives of the two women who run the ranch: brambly, authoritarian Vitòria and her weepy cousin Ermelinda. But the real drama is interior—Clarice Lispector's most wrenching and most intoxicating exploration of how a man becomes human, and of how language can transform a life into a destiny.

A highly sculpted, metaphysical book whose mysteries and allegories glow with a scintillating light, The Apple in the Dark is a masterpiece by "one of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century" (Colm Tóibín).

Translated by Benjamin Moser.