Apple in the Dark

Described by Clarice Lispector as 'the best one', this intoxicating portrayal of a man searching for his destiny is her mystical, enigmatic masterpiece

'All I've got is hunger. And that instable way of grasping an apple in the dark-without letting it fall'

Martim, believing that he has committed a murder, flees the city and escapes into the night. Wandering through the vastness of nature he arrives, in a state of fear and wonder, at a remote ranch run by two women. There Martim finds work and, as he labours in the blistering heat of the Brazilian summer, becomes transfigured; remade into something else entirely.

Translated by Benjamin Moser


'The most important Brazilian woman writer of the twentieth century... The richness of The Apple in the Dark defies the explanatory power of any single interpretation' TLS

Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century ― The New York Times Book Review

Clarice Lispector left behind an astounding body of work that has no real corollary inside literature or outside it -- Rachel Kushner ― Bookforum

Brilliant and unclassifiable: glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce -- Edmund White

One of the true originals of Latin American literature -- Terrence Rafferty ― The New York Times Book Review

A genius on the level of Nabokov -- Jeff VanderMeer ― Slate

Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century -- Parul Seghal ― The New York Times