The protagonist of Intimacies is the daughter of bi-cultural parents, whose international upbringing left her with a facility for mastering languages and the ability to feel as at home in once city as another.  The death of her father in New York City, where she also soon finds herself at the end of a job, inspires her to apply for (and she is accepted) the job of translating for the International Court in the Hague. There in the Netherlands she is new and yet not new- they had lived there for a time when she was a small child, but now she has no real connections to speak of, other than an acquaintance from when she worked in London.  While at dinner at that friend's apartment, the evening is disturbed by the police responding to a mugging closeby, where a man is seriously injured. She gets back to her apartment without incident, but the event's occurrence disturbs her and she becomes obsessed with finding out more about the victim. She finds out more about him from her friend, from information in the news, from visiting his bookshop, and her curiousity grows.  She is involved with a man who may or may not be completely available.  At work, she becomes the translator for a war criminal- the former President of an unnamed country, whose words she must interpret and translate for the court, to have them, in turn, translated by someone else to the victims. 

Intimacies has stayed with me. One of the things that the protagonist says of her work is that court translation takes a deep level of concentration and focus- that the job of the translator is to keep the gaps that exist between the words of one language and another as small as possible.  The novel shows how gaps exist not only in the translation from one language to another, but between people sharing an experience, between criminal and victim, witness and witness.  The book is that and a lot more. I read it in a single day, and emerged from it in awe.