The material collected here is a treasure trove, a fine retrospective and a comprehensive guide to the work of Ireland's greatest living novelist, John Banville. Selections are drawn from all of his novels, up to and including 2012's Ancient Light; each piece standing alone, short-story-like, but al[...]

2013 may be the best year yet for Best European Fiction. The inimitable John Banville joins the list of distinguished preface writers for Aleksandar Hemon's series, and A. S. Byatt represents England among a luminous cast of European contributors. Fans of the series will find everything they've grow[...]

John Banville's "Ancient Light" is a story of obsessive young love and the power of grief. 'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' In a small town in 1950s Ireland a fifteen-year-old boy has illicit meetings with a thirty-five-year-old woman - in the back of her car on su[...]

An early classic from the Man Booker-prize winning author of "The Sea."
"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[...]

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 a[...]

'A beautiful, beguiling book full of resonances that continue to sound long after you've turned the final page. Its imagining is magical, its execution dazzlingly skilful' - "Sunday Tribune". "Ghosts" opens with a shipwreck, leaving a party of sightseers temporarily marooned on an island. The strand[...]

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. He has little to say about the dead girl. He killed her, he says, because he was physically capable of doing so. It made perfect sense to [...]

Once the big house on an Irish estate, Birchwood has turned into a baroque madhouse for its ruined inhabitants. One disaster succeeds another, until young Gabriel Godkin runs away to join a travelling circus and look for his long-lost twin sister. Soon he discovers that famine and unrest stalk the c[...]

'A nearly perfectly fashioned work of art ...The Newton Letter gave this reader such pleasurable excitement that he found it impossible to concentrate on anything until he had read it again to make sure that it seemed as good on the seconding reading. It did' Irish Times A historian, on the brink of[...]

A collection of short stories from the early years of Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville's career, "Long Lankin" explores the passionate emotions--fear, jealousy, desire--that course beneath the surface of everyday life. From a couple at risk of being torn apart by the allure of wealth to[...]

Freddie Montgomery is a bad son, a worse husband, and a failed scientist. His expatriate life drags itself out in seedy resort bars. His one decisive act is to return home.But no sooner does he set foot on Irish soil than he steps in it. Trying robbery, he kills a servant. Freddie's lawyer proposes [...]

One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton's Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable narrator of John Banville's masterful new novel, is very old, recently widowed, and the bearer of a fearsome reputation as a literary dandy and bully. A product of the Old World, h[...]

A story of obsessive young love and the power of grief, "Ancient Light" is the best novel yet from the Booker Prize winner of "The Sea". 'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikel[...]