In a sunlit piazza on an April morning, women throw buckets of water over the cobbles and men deliver trays of pastry to trattorie. In a barren room above, a fanatic watches, engaged in the details of his life’s most important project: the assassination of one of Italy’s most beloved men of letters.

In this penetrating novella, David Malouf, the highly acclaimed Australian author and finalist for the Booker Prize, plumbs the darker uses of our passions. Weaving a dense tapestry of sensual observation and personal events of mythic importance, he re-creates the frighteningly fascinating mind of a madman poised at his moment of truth. Dazzling in its beauty, intensely enigmatic, Child’s Play conjures the mystical rising and falling of fear and pathos, where human idiosyncrasy and the incantatory rhythms of life give way to mania.