John Banville

Returning to Ireland to reclaim a painting that is part of his patrimony, a thirty-eight-year-old man commits a ghastly and motiveless murder, which he confesses in a novel-length narrative.

The author of The Untouchable (“contemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the “barely bearable raw immediacy” of his childhood memories. Interwoven with this story are Morden’s memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him “like a second heart.” What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer

Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family.The year is 1957 and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford—flinty, visibly Protestant, and determined to identify the murderer—faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in this tight-knit community. As he delves further, he learns the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community’s secrets, like the snowfall itself, threatens to obliterate everything.The incomparable Booker Prize winner's next great crime novel - the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home.

Book #3 from the series: St. John StraffordA “masterful” Booker Prize–winning author pens this Award winner “featuring colorful characters and a mysterious crime” (Kirkus Reviews starred review). While on vacation in Spain, Irish pathologist Quirke sees a familiar woman. There’s just one problem: She was murdered years ago… ⭐“Crackles with the kinetic energy of an approaching thunderstorm” (Booklist starred review).*NATIONAL BESTSELLER*Don't disturb the dead…On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cafés and the company of his disarmingly lovely wife. When he glimpses a familiar face in the twilight at Las Acadas bar, it's hard at first to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him.Because this young woman can't be April Latimer. She was murdered by her brother, years ago—the conclusion to an unspeakable scandal that shook one of Ireland's foremost political dynasties.Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home to Ireland and soon Detective St. John Strafford is dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one en route. A relentless hit man is on the hunt for his latest prey, and the next victim might be Quirke himself.Sumptuous, propulsive and utterly transporting, April in Spain is the work of a master writer at the top of his game.Don't miss John Banville's next novel, The Lock-up!Other riveting mysteries from John Banville: ▪ Snow

Booker Prize winner and “Irish master” (The New Yorker) John Banville’s most ambitious crime novel yet brings two detectives together to solve a globe-spanning mystery In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found dead in her car. Renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI St. John Strafford begin to investigate the death as a murder, but it’s the victim’s older sister Molly, an established journalist, who discovers a lead that could crack open the case. One of Rosa’s friends, it turns out, is from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after World War II. But as Quirke and Strafford close in, their personal lives may put the case, and the lives of everyone involved, in peril, including Quirke’s own daughter. Spanning the mountaintops of Italy, the front lines of World War II Bavaria, the gritty streets of Dublin and other unexpected locales, The Lock-Up is an ambitious and arresting mystery by one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

WINNER OF THE LANNAN LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION • From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes the fascinating story of a former British spy who's been unmasked as a Russian agent—and "one of spy fiction's greatest characters" (People). • "Contemporary fiction gets no better than this." — The New York Times Book ReviewOne of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation?As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and lover of men; betrayer and dupe. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskell's co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity, The Untouchable places John Banville in the select company of both Conrad and le Carre."Victor Maskell is one of the great characters in recent fiction.... The Untouchable is the best work of art in any medium on [its] subject." — Washington Post Book World"As remarkable a literary voice as any to come out of Ireland; Joyce and Beckett notwithstanding." — San Francisco Chronicle

From the renowned Booker Prize winner and nationally bestselling author of Snow comes a richly atmospheric new mystery about a woman’s sudden disappearance in a small coastal town in Ireland, where nothing is as it seems."John Banville is one of my favorite writers alive, and I pick up his books whenever I need a reminder how to write a good sentence.”—R.F. Kuang“He had seen drowned people. A sight not to be forgotten.”1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn’t approach but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea.Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally—the flawed but brilliant pathologist Quirke—a man he is linked to in increasingly complicated ways. But as the case unfolds, events from the past resurface that may have life-altering ramifications for all involved.At once a searing mystery and a profound meditation on the hidden worlds we all inhabit, The Drowned is the next great Strafford and Quirke novel from a beloved writer at the top of his game.

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant, profoundly moving new novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: a meditation on love and loss, and on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives.Is there any difference between memory and invention? That is the question that fuels this stunning novel, written with the depth of character, the clarifying lyricism and the sly humor that have marked all of John Banville’s extraordinary works. And it is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave, an actor in the twilight of his career and of his life, as he plumbs the memories of his first—and perhaps only—love (he, fifteen years old, the woman more than twice his age, the mother of his best friend; the situation impossible, thrilling, devouring and finally devastating) . . . and of his daughter, lost to a kind of madness of mind and heart that Cleave can only fail to understand. When his dormant acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role portraying a man who may not be who he says he is, his young leading lady—famous and fragile—unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see with aching clarity the “chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done.” Ancient Light is a profoundly moving meditation on love and loss, on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives, on how invention shapes memory and memory shapes the man. It is a book of spellbinding power and pathos from one of the greatest masters of prose at work today.

On a languid midsummer’s day in the countryside, the Godley family gathers at the bedside of Adam, a renowned mathematician and their patriarch. But they are not alone in their vigil. Around them hovers a clan of mischievous immortals—Zeus, Pan, and Hermes among them —who begin to stir up trouble for the Godleys, to sometimes wildly unintended effect. The Infinities—John Banville’s first novel since his Booker Prize-winning and bestselling The Sea—is at once a gloriously earthy romp and a wise look at the terrible, wonderful plight of being human -- a dazzling novel from one of the most widely admires and acclaimed writers at work today

A rich historical novel about the aftermath of betrayal, from the Booker prize-winning author. What was freedom, she thought, other than the right to exercise one's choices?Isabel Osmond, a spirited, intelligent young heiress, flees to London after being betrayed by her husband, to be with her beloved cousin Ralph on his deathbed. After a somber, silent existence at her husband's Roman palazzo, Isabel's daring departure to London reawakens her youthful quest for freedom and independence, as old suitors resurface and loyal friends remind her of happier times.But soon Isabel must decide whether to return to Rome to face up to the web of deceit in which she has become entangled or to strike out on her own once more.

John Banville, the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, now gives us a new novel - at once trenchant, witty, and shattering - about the intricacies of artistic creation, about theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselvesEqually self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme ("O O O. An absurdity. You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop"), is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who has never before been caught and steals only for pleasure. Both art and the art of thievery have been part of his "endless effort at possession," but now he's pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well. Having recognized the "man-killing crevasse" that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it, he has stopped painting. And his last act of thievery - the last time he felt its "secret shiver of bliss" - has been discovered. The fact that the purloined possession was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend has compelled him to run away - from his mistress, his home, his wife; from whatever remains of his impulse to paint; and from a tragedy that has long haunted him - and to sequester himself in the house where he was born. Trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have, excavating memories of family, of places he has called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him ("one of my eyes is forever turning towards the world beyond"), Olly reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself.

Axel Vander is an old man, in ill health, recently widowed, a scholar renowned for both his unquestionable authority and the ferocity and violence that often mark his conduct. He is known to be Belgian by birth, to have had a privileged upbringing, to have made a perilous escape from World War II–torn Europe—his blind eye and dead leg are indelible reminders of that time. But Vander is also a master liar (“I lied to lie”), his true identity shrouded under countless layers of intricately connected falsehoods. Now a young woman he doesn’t know, and whom he has dubbed “Miss Nemesis,” has threatened to expose the most fundamental and damaging of these lies. Vander has agreed to travel from California to meet her in Italy—in Turin, city of the most mysterious shroud—believing that he will have no difficulty rendering her harmless.But he is wrong. This woman—at once mad and brilliant, generous and demanding—will be the catalyst for Vander’s reluctant journey through his past toward the truths he has hidden, and toward others even he will be shocked to discover.In Shroud—as in all of his acclaimed previous novels—John Banville gives us an emotionally resonant tale, exceptionally rich in language and image, dazzling in its narrative invention. It is a work of uncommon power.

In this deeply moving and original book, John Banville alloys mystery, fable, and ghost story with poignant psychological acuity to forge the riveting story of a man wary of the future, plagued by the past, and so uncertain in the present that he cannot discern the spectral from the real.When renowned actor Alexander Cleave was a boy living in a large house with his widowed mother and various itinerant lodgers, he encountered a strikingly vivid ghost of his father. Now that he’s fifty and has returned to his boyhood home to recover from a breakdown on stage, he is not surprised to find the place still haunted. He is surprised, however, by new presences. And he is soon overwhelmed by how they, coupled with an onslaught of disturbing memories, compel him to confront the clutter that has become his life: ruined career, tenuous marriage, and troubled relationship with an estranged daughter.

From the revered, Booker Prize-winning author comes a playful, multi-layered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory, which opens with the return of one of his most celebrated characters—Freddie Montgomery from The Book of Evidence—as he is released from prison.A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sportscar—also borrowed—onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the dysfunctional Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request. With sparkling intelligence and rapier wit, John Banville revisits some of his career's most memorable characters, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived. The Singularities occupies a singular space and will surely be one of his most admired works.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a novel set in sixteenth-century Europe about an obscure cleric who is preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe—while being haunted by his malevolent brother and threatened by the conspiracies raging around him and his ideas. Sixteenth-century Europe is teeming with change and wars are being waged by princes and bishops and the repercussions of Luther are being felt through a convulsing Germany. In a remote corner of Poland a modest canon is practicing medicine and studying the heavens, preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe. In this astonishing work of historical imagination, John Banville offers a vivid portrait of a man of painful reticence. For, in a world that is equal parts splendor and barbarism, an obscure cleric who seeks “the secret music of the universe” poses a most devastating threat.

For the young John Banville, Dublin was a place of enchantment and yearning. Each year, on his birthday - the 8th of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception - he and his mother would journey by train to the capital city, passing frosted pink fields at dawn, to arrive at Westland Row and the beginning of a day's adventures that included much-anticipated trips to Clery's and the Palm Beach ice-cream parlour. The aspiring writer first came to live in the city when he was eighteen. In a once grand but now dilapidated flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped. It was a cold time, for society and for the individual - one the writer would later explore through the famed Benjamin Black protagonist Quirke - but underneath the seeming permafrost a thaw was setting in, and Ireland was beginning to change.Alternating between vignettes of Banville's own past, and present-day historical explorations of the city, Time Pieces is a vivid evocation of childhood and memory - that 'bright abyss' in which 'time's alchemy works' - and a tender and powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man. Accompanied by images of the city by photographer Paul Joyce.

An unnamed murderer has served his time in prison, then comes to live on a sparsely populated island with the enigmatic Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic companion, Licht. A sort of uneasy calm is operating in this world when a party of castaways arrives, with disquieting results. In this brilliantly haunting novel, John Banville forges an unforgettable amalgam of enchantment and menace that suggests both The Tempest and his own acclaimed The Book of Evidence. "A surreal and exquisitely lyrical new novel by one of the great stylists writing in English today."--Boston Globe.

Johannes Kepler, master mathematician and astronomer, developed his theories in 16th century pre-Renaissance Germany. His work laid the foundation on which his successors, notably Isaac Newton, built the modern picture of the universe, that held until Einstein.The author shows us a Rabelaisian world...chaotic, muddled, and dirty. Kepler's family mirrored this disorder, and he retreated into his own cerebrations for relief. Kepler took the theories of his time and stood them on their head. He extracted truth from superstition, and this story, in Banville's hands, is a triumph, heroic and exuberant.

A historian, trying to finish a long-overdue book on Isaac Newton, rents a cottage not far by train from Dublin for the summer. All he needs, he thinks, is a few weeks of concentrated work. Why, he must unravel, did Newton break down in 1693? What possessed him to write that strange letter to his friend John Locke? But in the long seeping summer days, old sloth and present reality take over.

A classic novel of family, isolation, and a blighted Ireland from the Man Booker-prize winning author of The Sea— about the end of innocence for a boy and his country. I am therefore I think . So starts John Banville’s 1973 novel Birchwood , a novel that centers around Gabriel Godkin and his return to his dilapidated family estate. After years away, Gabriel returns to a house filled with memories and despair. Delving deep into family secrets—a cold father, a tortured mother, an insane grandmother—Gabriel also recalls his first encounters with love and loss. Birchwood is a remarkable and complex story, told in the brilliantly styled prose of one of our most essential writers.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita. • "A strange and dreamlike book ... Banville has a breathtaking style." — The Boston Globe

A masterful, enthralling new novel from the Booker Prize winnerEverything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder me . . . 1899. As the new century approaches, struggling English writer Evelyn Dolman--a hack, by his own description -- marries Laura Rensselaer, daughter of an American oil tycoon. Evelyn anticipates that he and Laura will inherit a substantial fortune and lead a comfortable, settled life. But his hopes are dashed when a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, just before the patriarch’s death, leads to her disinheritance.The unhappy newlyweds travel to Venice to celebrate the New Year at the Palazzo Dioscuri, ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo. From their first moments at the palazzo, a series of seemingly otherworldly occurrences begin to accumulate. Evelyn’s already frayed nerves disintegrate could it be the mist blanketing the floating city, or is he losing his mind?Venetian Vespers is a haunting, atmospheric noir with a surprise around every cobwebbed a fitting return by one of the most sophisticated stylists of our time.

A work of dazzling imagination that takes as its theme the price the true scientist or artist must pay for his calling in terms of his own humanity, his ability to live fully.

The fourth book in Bloomsbury's Writer and the City series.From one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern European experience, a panoramic view of a city that has seduced and bewitched visitors for centuries.Prague is the magic capital of Europe. Since the days of Emperor Rudolf II, "devotee of the stars and cultivator of the spagyric art", who in the late 1500s summoned alchemists and magicians from all over the world to his castle on Hradcany hill, it has been a place of mystery and intrigue. Wars, revolutions, floods, the imposition of Soviet communism, and even the depredations of the tourist boom after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 could not destroy the unique atmosphere of this beautiful, proud, and melancholy city on the Vltava. John Banville traces Prague's often tragic history and portrays the people who made it: the emperors and princes, geniuses and charlatans, heroes and scoundrels. He also paints a portrait of the Prague of today, reveling in its newfound freedoms, eager to join the European Community and at the same time suspicious of what many Praguers see as yet another totalitarian takeover. He writes of his first visit to the city, in the depths of the Cold War, and of subsequent trips there, of the people he met, the friends he made, the places he came to know.

a very good revised edition published by the Gallery Press 1984

‘They took everything from me. Everything.’ So says the central character of Nightspawn, John Banville’s elusive, first novel, in which the author rehearses now familiar attributes: his humour, ironies, and brilliant knowing. In the arid setting of the Aegean, Ben White indulges in an obsessive quest to assemble his ‘story’ and to untangle his relationships with a cast of improbable figures. Banville’s subversive, Beckettian fiction embraces themes of freedom and betrayal, and toys with an implausible plot, the stuff of an ordinary ‘thriller’ shadowed by political intrigue. In this elaborate artifact, Banville’s characters ‘sometimes lose the meaning of things, and everything is just . . . funny’. There begins their search for ‘the magic to combat any force’.

The work of Copernicus famously shattered the medieval view of the universe. Here his life is powerfully evoked in a novel that tells of a shy man, baffled by the conspiracies that rage around him and his ideas while he searches for the truth.Johannes Kepler, born in 1571, was one of the world's greatest mathematicians and astronomers. This novel brilliantly recreates his life and his drive to chart the stars and planets. In so doing it illuminates the realities of Renaissance Europe, its harshness and its glory."The Newton Letter" concerns a contemporary historian writing a biography of Isaac Newton. He retires to the country to finish his book, but is hampered when he becomes obsessed with Newton's nervous collapse in the summer of 1693, and with the family from whom he rents a summer cottage.

THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE: Freddie Montgomery has committed two crimes. He stole a small Dutch master from a wealthy family friend, and he murdered a chambermaid who caught him in the act. This is a remarkable crime novel, unlike any other in its flawlessly flowing prose, its irony, its aching sense of loss.GHOSTS: An unnamed murderer has served his time in prison and now lives on a sparsely populated island with the enigmatic Professor Kreutznaer and his eery companion, Licht. Their uneasy calm is disturbed one day with the arrival of a party of castaways. A beautiful and beguiling novel full of resonances that continue to sound long after you have turned the final page, this is also one of Banville's funniest books.ATHENA: Morrow is at a loose end when, separately, two people beckon him up the stairs of an empty Dublin house. One offers work of a dubious kind; the other offers a sort of love. Banville's sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose will leave the reader longing for more from this consummately skilled novelist.'Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift for seeing people's souls' Don De Lillo (on "The Book of Evidence")

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SNOW'Absorbing' The Times'Gripping' ScotsmanQuirke's pathology department, set deep beneath 1950s Dublin, is his own gloomy always quiet, always night, and always under his control. Until, late one evening, he stumbles across a body that should not be there.The investigation he opens uncovers a dark secret at the heart of the city's high Catholic network - a secret with the power to shake his own family and everything he holds dear.Praise for the Quirke 'A joy to read.' Sunday Times'Darkly dangerous [with] flinty humour.' Daily Telegraph'Beguiling characters and evocative settings . . . Impeccable.' The Times