John Banville

**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. ### From Booklist *Starred Review* Settling into a meditative retirement, stage actor Alexander Cleave finds himself writing about the summer he was 15 and embroiled in a mad and taboo love. He much prefers recalling the wildness of his insistent young self than dwelling on the unhappy life and inexplicable death of his enigmatic daughter. Following the mischief of The Infinities (2010), Banville’s breathtaking new novel is defined by light, from the “ancient light” of the stars to the glimmering fool’s gold of memories. As Alex tries to pin down the uncomfortable truth about his delirious, risky affair with his best friend’s mother, he reflects on how all his desperate lies ultimately helped him become an actor. His lush if dismaying reverie is interrupted by an out-of-the-blue invitation to star in an American movie, a biopic about, of all subjects, a vile critic whose life may have some vague link to Alex’s daughter’s death. Banville, a writer of exquisite precision and emotional depth, writes with droll inquisition and entrancing sensuality in this suspenseful drama of the obliviousness of lust and the weight of grief. Alex’s misremembered love story and complicated movie adventures are ravishing, poignant, and archly hilarious as the past and present converge and narrow down to a stunning revelation. Banville is supreme in this enrapturing novel of shadows and illumination. --Donna Seaman ### Review Glittering visual evocation, expressed in a tone at once fresh and wistfully ironic ... a world at once random, dreamlike and deeply experienced The Sunday Times 4 STARS. Banville proves here over and over that one can write with the true texture if erotic memory without resorting to titillation. He deserves to outsell Fifty Shades of Grey tenfold. Sunday Express 4 STARS. Prose that lingers on every last physical and psychological detail. Metro Banville does regretful roues better than almost anyone ... His use of language can also be startlingly brilliant ... Terrific ... full of sadness and yearning. Sunday Telegraph This dazzling novel captures a long-lost adolescent world of passion and desire. Independent ... ravishingly written and scrupulously observed Irish Times The Booker prize winning author - widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in English today - has produced what many already consider a literary masterpiece. Sunday Independent We now want them [novels] to provoke, cajole, edify, entertain, puzzle, divert, clarify and console. Banville's new novel does all these things and much more besides. Irish Independent Banville, with his forensic sensory memory, his great gift for textural (and textual) precision, his ability to inhabit not just a room, as a writer, but also the full weight of a breathing body, is exactly in his element here. Observer A novel criss-crossed with ghost roads and dead-ends and peopled by shifty characters who seem provisional even to themselves. It is written in Baville's customary prose, rhythmic and allusive and dense with suggestive imagery, prose and deliberately slows you down and frequently wrongfoots you. Guardian A bittersweet rumination on first love ... The language soars, full of the beauty of nature and the sadness of loss Marie Claire Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence, the body yearning for sexual experience, the mind blurring eroticism and emotion ... Banville is a Nabokovian artist, his prose so rich, poetic and packed with startling imagery that reading it is akin to gliding regally through a lake of praline: it's a slow, stately process, delicious and to be savoured ... This is a luminous breathtaking work Independent on Sunday Ancient Light also bears resemblance to Lolita that extend beyond the obvious hallmark ecstatic prose..different periods of his life blending into a single meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears. The Financial Times A beautifully written tale of youthful passion Good Housekeeping A novel about sexual awakening and the tricks that memory plays. Banville's lushly gorgeous prose enhances a mood of brooding passion in a place of secrets The I

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 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. At once a novel of a family, of isolation, and of a blighted Ireland, Birchwood is a remarkable and complex story about the end of innocence for one boy and his country, told in the brilliantly styled prose of one of our most essential writers.

‘Banville is superb . . . there are not many historical novels of which it can be said that they illuminate both the time that forms their subject matter and the time in which they are read: Doctor Copernicus is among the very best of them’ The EconomistThe first in John Banville Revolutions Trilogy and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Doctor Copernicus is a rich historical novel that explores the life of one of history's greatest scientists. The work of Nicholas Koppernigk, better known as Copernicus, shattered the medieval view of the universe and led to the formulation of the image of the solar system we know today. Here his life is powerfully evoked in a novel that offers a vivid portrait of a man of painful reticence, haunted by a malevolent brother and baffled by the conspiracies that rage around him and his ideas while he searches for the secret of life.

<p>A captivating, melancholy ghost story will captivate every discerning reader.Alexander Cleave, actor, has left his career and his family behind and banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life, but finds this impossible in a house brimming with presences, some ghostly, some undeniably human. Memories, anxiety for the future and more particularly for his beloved but troubled daughter, conspire to distract him from his dreaming retirement.This humane and beautifully written story tells the tragic tale of a man, intelligent, preposterous and vulnerable, who in attempting to bring the performance to a close finds himself travelling inevitably towards a devastating denouement.'This unsparing, compassionate, humane book demonstrates again that Banville is in a class of his own' Spectator'A contemporary fable of piercing sadness and melancholy beauty. . . This poetic novel deals with archetypal themes as well as painful truths about parental inadequacy and...

<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Irish author Banville (The Book of Evidence; The Untouchable) is one of the most seductive writers currently at work. His books are so intensely imagined and freshly observed, with a startling image or insight on every page, that story almost ceases to matter. In fact, his tale here is tenuous in the extreme. Alexander Cleave is a successful actor because only in performance can he hide his essential hollowness, his sense of his own intangibility. When his career starts to falter, he retreats to his childhood home in a small town by the sea and tries to learn to live with himself, to discover who he really is. Into this existential anguish intrude memories of his parents, his estranged wife, his emotionally damaged daughterDand the ghosts of people he may not even know, but to whose sadness he is attuned. He begins an uneasy relationship with a slovenly caretaker, Quirke, and Quirke's enigmatic teenage daughter, Lily; he is visited by his wife; he goes to a strangeDand magnificently evokedDcircus with Lily; he receives terrible news about his daughter. There is by no means a surfeit of incident, and the book never falters or creates impatience because every scene, every moment, is so alive, so exquisitely lit, felt and polished, that to read among them is like listening to great music. And when Banville does choose toward the end to raise the emotional temperature, the effect is deeply moving. (Feb. 28) Forecast: Banville will probably never be a hugely popular writer, and The Eclipse, unlike The Untouchable, is not structured along conventional lines. But perceptive reviews and the support of people who love exquisitely turned prose will help to slowly build his readership. <br />Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>The Banvillian narrator is often antisocial to the point of alienating his own audience. Armed with perfect diction, he uses language to hole up in an exclusive, hopelessly cool state of mind where the well-adjusted are unwanted. Esteemed stage actor Alexander Cleave is the latest in a line of haunted white males from Banville (The Untouchable). Beleaguered by a premonition of death, he quits the summer tour to live in his dilapidated childhood home, much to his wife's contempt. Although his seemingly irrational fears do have a climax, it will leave readers dumbfounded. This has a lot to do with the misleading "plot"Aa tedious chain of Alexander's memories about his tortured mother and aloof father. Banville's leading man is at his best when he plays a caring father to the housekeeper Quirke's daughter, but this comes too late. Not recommended.<br /><em>-AHeather McCormack, "Library Journal" </em><br />Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

The Booker Prize–winning author of The Sea re-creates the life of the Renaissance mathematical genius Johannes Kepler and his incredible drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe. Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in southern Germany, was one of the world’s greatest mathematicians and astronomers. The novel Kepler by John Banville brilliantly re-creates his life and his work, which laid the foundation of the universe even while he was being driven from exile to exile by religious and domestic strife. At the same time, it illuminates the harsh realities of the Renaissance world, rich in imaginative daring but rooted in poverty, squalor and the tyrannical power of emperors. "What Banville writes is historically accurate, but his [are] a novelist's truth, and…a lover's prose. " —Newsweek

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 an old man’s descent into nature, the tales in this collection showcase the talents that launched Banville onto the literary scene. Offering a unique insight into the mind of “one of the great living masters of English-language prose” (Los Angeles Times), these nine haunting sketches stand alone as canny observations on the turbulence of the human condition.

‘Fable, intellectual thriller, Gothic extravaganza, symbolist conundrum . . . a true work of art’ Sunday Independent Is there a numerical solution to the quest for the meaning of life? A brilliant reworking of the classic Dr Faustus theme, Mefisto focuses on the mathematically gifted Gabriel Swan, who seeks a numerical solution to his quest for order and meaning in life. ‘Mefisto renders all superlatives woefully inadequate . . . Undisputed master of language, the laconic pause and the blackly comic, Banville is a supreme stylist . . . He is a magician . . . Another expectedly astonishing and very daring display from this richly, almost wickedly, gifted artist’ Time Out ‘An excellent novel, beautifully written. The sort of thing you have to read more than once – wonderful stuff’ Punch ‘Few writers in Ireland today can arouse such expectation by the advent of a new novel . . . A profound beauty of words displayed by their lover . . . Banville’s great enterprise does not falter . . . read Mefisto straight through; it deserves it’ Irish Times ### Review A novel of virtuosic scope, written in a style as pristine as the rarefied mountain air atop the Brocken. --The New York Times Intense, cerebral, linguistically inventive. --Cleveland Plain Dealer ### About the Author John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fourteen previous novels including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

<h3>From</h3><p>Here is the latest installment in Bloomsbury's fascinating Writer in the City series, which matches well-known writers with cities with which they are intimately familiar. Banville has not written a guidebook but rather, in his own words, "a handful of recollections, variations on a theme"--snapshots, if you like, of the city's past and present. The book begins with the author's first visit to Prague, during the cold war, but as we go deeper into the book, we also go deeper into the city's history. Banville flicks so effortlessly between past and present that Prague soon appears as a collage, effectively lifting the city's rich and visible past out of time and bringing it to life once again, as the author visits the birthplace of Franz Kafka or steps inside a cathedral whose construction was begun in 1344. While most travel memoirs clearly distinguish between the way a place is today and the way it used to be, Banville's perspective is somewhat different. This, he says, is Prague, past and present, the way it has always been. <em>David Pitt</em><br /><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p><h3>Review</h3><p>"As remarkable a literary voice as any to come out of Ireland, Joyce and Beckettt notwithstanding." -- <em>,San Francisco Chronicle,</em> </p><p>"Ireland's finest contemporary novelist." -- <em>,The Economist,</em> </p><p>"Mr. Banville is that rare writer who can pack all five senses into one declarattive sentence." -- <em>,Wall Street Journal,</em> </p><p>"What is unusual-defiantly and therefore perhaps gloriously so-about Banville.iss the prose: poetic, sensuous, revelatory." -- <em>,New York Review of Books,</em> </p><p>Praise for John Banville: </p><p>"Ireland's finest contemporary novelist."-_The Economist_ </p><p>"Mr. Banville is that rare writer who can pack all five senses into one declarative sentence."<br />-_Wall Street Journal_ </p><p>"As remarkable a literary voice as any to come out of Ireland, Joyce and Beckett notwithstanding."-_San Francisco Chronicle_ </p><p>"What is unusual-defiantly and therefore perhaps gloriously so-about Banville...is the prose: poetic, sensuous, revelatory."-_New York Review of Books_<br />-- <em>Review</em></p>

<p>Axel Vander, distinguished intellectual and elderly academic, is not the man he seems. When a letter arrives out of the blue, threatening to unveil his secrets - and carefully concealed identity - Vander travels to Turin to meet its author. There, muddled by age and alcohol, unable always to distinguish fact from fiction, Vander comes face to face with the woman who has the knowledge to unmask him, Cass Cleave. However, her sense of reality is as unreliable as his, and the two are quickly drawn together, their relationship dark, disturbed and doomed to disaster from its very start.

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the Booker Prize winner of The Sea comes “an astonishing, disturbing little novel that might have been coughed up from hell" (The New York Times Book Review) about the dark confession of an improbable murderer. “Ireland’s finest contemporary novelist.” —The Economist Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband and father living the life of a dissolute exile on a Mediterranean island. When a debt comes due and his wife and child are held as collateral, he returns to Ireland to secure funds. That pursuit leads to murder. And here is his attempt to present evidence, not of his innocence, but of his life, of the events that lead to the murder he committed because he could. Like a hero out of Nabokov or Camus, Montgomery is a chillingly articulate, self-aware, and amoral being, whose humanity is painfully on display.

### Amazon.com Review **A Q &A with Author John Banville** **Question:** Where did you get the idea to use Greek gods as characters in a novel? And then how did you settle on the ones we meet in *The Infinities*? **John Banville:** I have always been an admirer of the great German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, particularly the play I consider his masterpiece, *The Infinities* quite closely on Amphitryon, but fiction has its own laws and its own demands, and the finished novel is an autonymous creature, though the Kleist is still there in skeletal form. **Question:** Why did you decide to make Adam Godley a mathematician? **John Banville:** I don’t know that I ever actively decided to make him anything."Decisions" in the writing of fiction tend to be mostly a matter of dream and drift. But I wanted him to be someone operating in an otherworld of speculation, pure number, and infinitudes, where the gods might be already at play. **Question:** There is something so classical and familiar about the death bed scene, the family patriarch dying and the family coming from far and wide to gather at his bedside. What about the death bed construct appealed to you as a starting off point? **John Banville:** Again, I didn’t think of the book as centering on a death bed scene--and I don’t think it does, really--but of course fiction is a tired old business where there is nothing new under even the intensest sun. In fact, one of the pleasures of working in the novel form is the challenge of finding new ways to present old things. Spinoza says somewhere that the wise man thinks only of death but all his thoughts will thereby be a contemplation of life. I hope that’s the case with *The Infinities* , and that everything in it is vividly alive, even the dying old man upstairs. **Question:** Many readers have commented on the humor in this novel. Is it harder for you to write comedy or tragedy (which you have certainly done in previous novels)? **John Banville:** All my books are funny, if you know how to listen for the jokes. The novel, at a certain basic level, is a comic form. Do you know the story of Kafka reading to a group of friends from **Question:** This novel takes place over the course of a single day. Why did you decide on that time structure? **John Banville:** I was following Amphitryon in this--preserving the unities, as the Aristotelians say. There is a nice compactness to the time-scale in the book, which I like. Also the fact of limiting the action to a single day makes for a mysterious sweet melancholy. Everyone has days that will live in the memory for a lifetime; for my characters, that Midsummer Day is one. **Question:** So Hermes is our narrator (though, of course, John Banville is really our narrator). So author as messenger? Author as God? Or is that just reading too much into it? **John Banville:** Well, of course, in the little world of a novel the author is a god, or at least a demigod, watching over his creatures, helping them, if he can, or at least not hindering them. In a wider sense, I find the pagan world of the Greeks highly appealing, and wish we could regain their state of innocence and sophistication. Bring back the old gods, I say. (Photo © Jerry Bauer) * * * ### From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Having apparently exorcised his taste for bloody intrigue with his pseudonym, Benjamin Black, Banville returns to high form (and his given name) with a novel even more pristine than his Booker-winning *The Sea*. Old Adam Godley lies dying, flying through his past on the way to eternity while his brooding son (also named Adam) sleepwalks through his marriage to the amorous Helen, and young Adam's loony sister, Petra, writes an encyclopedia of human morbidity. But Adam and his brood are not alone, nor is our narrator any detached third person: the gods are afoot, chiefly Hermes, disguised as a farmer, whispering to us of mortal love, guiding old Adam on his way, and laying bare all the Godleys' secrets while divine Zeus conducts illicit amours with Helen. Hermes assures us that mortal speech is barely articulate gruntings, yet Banville has the perfect instrument for his textured prose, almost never as finely tuned as this. The narrative is rife with asides, but it is to the common trajectory of a life that—despite the noise crowding ailing Adam's repose—it lends its most consoling notes, elevating the temporal and profane to the holy eternal. *(Mar.)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

SUMMARY: In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel — among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

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 doubleness: 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