First published in 1953, And Never Said a Word is one of Heinrich Boll's finest works, a novel that explores the extremities of marriage with depth and compassion. Boll evokes an entire emotional world in the space of a day and a half as husband and wife alternately relate this story of love and isolation, poverty and injustice. Weakness, as well as strength, provides the subtle emotional threads that form the bonds of their love; married life, they discover, takes a far greater toll on all those who truly love than on those whose hearts are empty. Boll writes with a moral resonance that extracts significance from the most commonplace lives.