John Banville

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 suddeness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother;...

Attending the deathbed of a renowned mathematician, his second wife and adult children reflect on their personal demons, including the son's pretty wife, who has caught the attention of the mischievous god Zeus.

"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...

"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...

Presents a memoir of the author's life near Dublin, a city that inspired his imagination and literary life and served as a backdrop for the dissatisfactions of adult years shaped by Dublin's cultural, political, architectural, and social history. "Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, author John Banville ... saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child. It was first a birthday treat, the world his beloved, eccentric...

Alexander Cleaver, a famous actor with a disintegrating career, retreats to his childhood home where he struggles to come to terms with his memories, the unsettling presence of a caretaker and teenage housekeeper, and ghosts of the past.

Freddie Montgomery, a thirty-eight-year-old one-time scientist, returns to his native Ireland to reclaim a seventeenth-century Dutch school painting which he believes to be part of his patrimony, committing a ghastly murder along the way.

A woman passes as a man in order to work and survive in 19th century Ireland. Some thirty years after donning men's clothing, she finds herself trapped in a prison of her own making.