An unlikely set of six, each obsessed with the sea, each burdened with a problem, arrive at Almayer: a seaside inn on an unknown shore inhabited only by four “precocious, spirit-like children”. Their back stories and present lives intersect in the most unpredictable ways resulting in a seemingly disjointed plot that Alessandro Baricco skilfully weaves into a single narrative strand.

Among the travellers is a painter who is determined to find where the sea begins and paints “the sea with the sea” dipping his brush into the surf and smearing it on white canvases, and a professor who wants to know precisely where the sea ends – the point at which waves break on the shore – for the Encyclopaedia of Limits he is writing. For them, the “sea is a place where you take leave of yourself”.

Reading Ocean Sea is a leap of faith, as you cannot understand what is going on and why, but there are passages of extraordinary depth and beauty that take you to the heart of life. And then, almost miraculously, it all comes together. The jigsaw is completed.

The novel won the Viareggio Prize, a prestigious Italian award named after the Tuscan city.

Published in Italian in 1993. Translated into English by Alastair McEwan, published in 1999.

While in Ocean Sea Baricco spins out long, elaborate sentences strung together by countless phrases and clauses, here he is sparse, restrained without a touch of anything ornate. At 91 pages, Silk feels like nothing (and everything) between the fingertips.

Herve Joncour is a French silk breeder who lives in the small town of Lavilledieu in France with his beloved wife. When an epidemic threatens the silk worms, he leaves his comfortable home and travels to Japan – “to the end of the world” – to obtain Japanese eggs for fresh breeding. But it is the 1860s and Japan is closed to foreigners and he has to do this in secrecy with a local baron.

It is there he begins to love a woman, the baron’s concubine, with “eyes that did not have an Oriental slant”. They never speak or touch, replacing tactile intimacy by gestures: a glance, or sipping tea from the same place on the rim of the cup. “Come back, or I shall die,” she writes to him in the course of the novel that’s haunted by their silent chemistry and for those words alone he would sacrifice his life to do no more than see his beloved again. When the civil war in Japan destroys the village and makes the distance between them permanent, Joncour’s tale becomes one of longing “…to die of nostalgia for something you will never live.”

A theatre adaptation of the novel was made in 2005, and Silk, the film, was released in 2007.

Published in Italian in 1996. Translated into English by Ann Goldstein, published in 1999.

In an old house in the countryside, in an anonymous country, during an unnamed civil war, Manuel Roca’s enemies hunt him down and kill him along with his son. The only member of the family who is spared is Nina, his youngest child, hidden in a hole beneath his farmhouse floor. Tito, one of the murderers, discovers Nina and, in an extraordinary act of mercy, keeps her a secret.

Many years later, as a woman in her fifties, Nina tracks down her silent saviour and invites him for a drink. As they talk, he learns that that the other assassins have died under unknown circumstances and he is the last one left. He is sure that the woman is aiming to extract her final revenge. But he goes for the drink regardless.

Until the end of the novella it remains ambiguous whether Nina is going to kill Tito or forgive him, but the climax certainly comes as “a visceral shock”.

Without Blood is “Designed not for consumption, but for meditation. This story hangs around the neck, curls into you,” says The Observer. This anorexic, tiny, fragment of a book is more powerful and satisfying than many of those fat and chunky revenge thrillers on the shelves. It’s spare and understated, like a true Baricco book, with nothing extraneous coming in the way of the core story.

Published in Italian in 2002. Translated into English by Ann Goldstein, published in 2004.

What must the war at the heart of Homer’s The Iliad looked like to each of the participants? Did everyone fight in the war over Helen between the Achaeans and Troy with the same mission? If each of them tell the story, would it be different and unique?

An Iliad seizes on the central scenes of battle in Homer’s The Iliad and retells them from the perspective of the different characters by turn with an intimacy that the Greek bard’s lofty narration did not try to achieve. “To receive correctly a text that comes from so far away in time, it is necessary above all to sing it to our own music,” Baricco says in his note on the text.

Taking far fewer liberties with the story than David Benioff did with his screenplay for Troy, Baricco retells the events of more than 3,000 years ago – from the return of Chryseis to the burial of Hector – as a human story and not one of the gods. He adds new commentary, removes excessive repetitions and stylises the language to make the grand epic more accessible and interesting for the modern day reader.

The Sunday Review calls Silk the commercial success that established Baricco, and An Iliad another commercial success, attributed by some in Italy to what has been called the “Baricco trademark”: the handsome young writer, his white shirt sleeves rolled up, mesmerizing an audience of literature groupies and à la page female high school teachers.

Published in Italian in 2004. Translated into English by Ann Goldstein, published in 2006.