A + B – Paperback

A man opens his eyes in the dust of a bombed city. He does not know his name or who he was. Yet he knows how to strip a rifle, how to find north without a compass, how to recite Lucretius in Latin. Behind a broken wall he finds a blond boy crying. They give each other two letters instead of names: A and B. Short names for quick information.

There is no government anymore, no army: only gangs of ragged men armed to the teeth who will shoot each other over a can of peaches. The two of them have one direction only, thirty-five degrees, toward the hills, toward a forest where it might still be possible to live.

And something happens that nobody can explain: sometimes the boy becomes a man, and the man becomes a boy again.

In the woods they meet a woman who refuses to be a letter and a red-haired little girl who chooses to call herself D. By day there are ambushes, gunfights, raiders. In the evening, around a fire that cannot be seen, there are the questions: who are we without memory? Does God exist? And if he does not, why all this horror?

A hard and tender novel of fights, escapes and hand-to-hand combat, and of long night conversations: who we are, why we are in the world, why we can think, whether it is better to live alone or together, what a just world would look like, and how a man can become worse than any beast. A book about friendship, about love, and about what remains of us when everything else has been erased.