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 Vit ria 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 a 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, Apple in the Dark is a masterpiece by "one of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century'" (Colm T ibin).

Translated by Benjamin Moser.

About the Author

Clarice Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920. In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, her family fled to Brazil, where she arrived when she was a little more than a year old. She published her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, in 1943, when she was just twenty-three, and died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.