It opens with a sudden, intimate violence: a family executed, a house emptied. One child survives — spared by a man who should have killed her.

Many years later, that child, now a woman, seeks him out. The past is revisited obliquely, through fragments and hesitation, as both characters are forced to reckon with what survival has made of them.

Without Blood is a brief but piercing meditation on damage and mercy, on the afterlife of violence. Ann Goldstein’s lucid translation preserves the novel’s delicate precision, allowing its emotional weight to accumulate quietly — and linger long after the final page.

First edition paperback. Worn, but inside spotless.