Aharon Appelfeld 
Blooms of Darkness 

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012. "Aharon Appelfeld is fiction’s foremost chronicler of the Holocaust. The stories he tells, as here in Blooms of Darkness, are small, intimate, and quietly narrated and yet are transfused into searing works of art by Appelfeld’s profound understanding of loss, pain, cruelty, and grief." – Philip Roth