John Banville

Middle-aged, brilliant and bored, Roger Lambert is a professor of Divinity at a New England university. Firmly convinced that religious belief can only justified by recourse to pure faith, he is dismissive when visited by a gangling student who claims, with evangelical zeal, that computer technology is on the brink of proving the existence of God. But when his unhappy wife flings herself into an affair with the younger man, and Roger's faith in his own placid life is thrown into question. With his marriage close to collapse, he finds himself increasingly drawn to his own half-niece, the nineteen-year-old Verna, in this cunning and comic exploration of religion, uncertainty and passion.

'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 unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back of his lover's car on sunny mornings and rain-soaked afternoons. And with these early memories comes something sharper and much darker - the more recent recollection of the actor's own daughter's suicide ten years before. Ancient Light is the story of a life rendered brilliantly vivid: the obsession and selfishness of young love and the terrifying shock of grief. It is a dazzling novel, funny, utterly pleasurable and devastatingly moving in the same moment.'Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death' Financial Times'Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence. A luminous, breathtaking work' Independent on Sunday'Startlingly brilliant. Terrific - full of sadness and yearning' Sunday Telegraph

Adultery is always put in terms of thieving. Oliver Orme is a painter who has abandoned his art. His days are now haunted by loss: loss of desire; of artistic vision; of the people he has loved. And only now does he realize that those around him understand him more than he does himself.

‘Sleek, beautiful, breathtakingly cunning prose’ Sunday TimesAthena is the third in the Frames Trilogy, a set of loosely connected novels by the Booker Prize-winning author, John Banville. Morrow – a clerkish, middle-aged type encumbered with a chain-smoking dying aunt and a considerable talent for wallowing – is at a loose end when, on two separate occasions, he is beckoned up the stairs of an empty Dublin house. The first is an offer of dubious work, and Morrow soon becomes caught up in a conspiracy to authenticate a series of fake paintings. The second, possibly even odder, is an offer of a love – of a sort. Written in typically luminous prose and featuring a rich cast of characters, Athena is a paean to art, painting, and love, in all its mercurial richness.

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: "a devastating account of a boy's sexual awakening and the loss of his childhood.... Seamless and] profound ... An unsettling and beautiful work." --Wall Street JournalIs there a difference between memory and invention? That is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave as he reflects on his first, and perhaps only, love--an underage affair with his best friend's mother. When his stunted acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role playing a man who may not be who he claims, his young leading lady--famous and fragile--unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see, with startling clarity, the gap between the things he has done and the way he recalls them. Profoundly moving, Ancient Light is written with the depth of character, clarifying lyricism, and heart-wrenching humor that mark all of Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville's extraordinary works.

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 sunny mornings, and in a rundown cottage in the country on rain-soaked afternoons. Unsure why she has chosen him, he becomes obsessed and tormented by this first love. Half a century later, actor Alexander Cleave - grieving for the recent loss of his daughter - recalls these trysts, trying to make sense of the boy he was and of the needs and frailties of the human heart.Praise for Ancient Light:'Startlingly brilliant. Terrific - full of sadness and yearning' Sunday Telegraph'Dazzling . . . captures a long-lost adolescent world of passion and desire', Independent'Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death' Financial TimesJohn 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 was recently awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Dublin.

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 also resonating with those around it and representing the novel from which it comes. There are radio plays, some published in print for the first time here. There is a judicious selection of his essays and reviews. Perhaps most beguiling of all are the pieces of memoir, the early work (including Banville’s first-ever piece of published fiction, from 1966) and the chance to see facsimiles of the handwritten first draft of the opening section of The Infinities. Possessed of a Past is an extraordinary document of the writer’s life and work across nearly fifty years of practice, simultaneously offering the perfect introduction to Banville’s sublime art and manna to devoted readers.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a novel that is at once a gloriously earthy romp and a wise look at the terrible, wonderful plight of being human. "One of the great living masters of English-language prose. The Infinities is a dazzling example of that mastery." --Los Angeles Times 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 Untouchable is an engrossing, exquisitely written and almost bewilderingly smart book . . . It’s the fullest book I’ve read in a very long time, utterly accomplished, thoroughly readable, written by a novelist of vast talent’ Richard Ford Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After the announcement in the Commons and the hasty revelation of his double life of wartime espionage, his disgrace is public, his knighthood revoked, his position as curator of the Queen’s pictures terminated. There are questions to be answered. For whom has he been sacrificed? To what has he sacrificed his life?The Untouchable is beautifully crafted novel inspired by the famous Cambridge Spies by John Banville, the author of the Booker prize-winning The Sea.

'Maybe it was time I forgot about Nico Peterson, and his sister, and the Cahuilla Club, and Clare Cavendish. Young, beautiful and expensively dressed, Clare Cavendish wants Marlowe to find her former lover. Caught under the spell of this black-eyed blonde, Marlowe also finds himself tangling with one of L.A.'s richest families.

A SUNDAY TIMES AND TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR, SHORTLISTED FOR THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2025 FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SNOW AND THE SEA 'Memorable and disturbing.' GUARDIAN 'A slyly fashioned work of art.' IRISH TIMES Everything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder me. . . Winter 1899, and strange things are afoot. As the new century approaches, English hack writer Evelyn Dolman marries Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of a wealthy American plutocrat. But in the midst of a rift between Laura and her father, Evelyn's plans for a substantial inheritance look to be dashed. Arriving in Venice for their belated honeymoon at Palazzo Dioscuri - the ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo - the couple are met by a series of seemingly otherworldly occurrences, which exacerbate Evelyn's already frayed nerves. Is it just the sea mist blanketing the floating city, or is he really losing his mind? 'A marvellous and rewarding novelist . . . He is a magician, really.' THE SCOTSMAN 'Banville has a grim gift of seeing people's souls.' DON DeLILLO'The most eminent innovator in Irish fiction of the last 50 years.' IRISH TIMES 'One of my favourite writers alive.' REBECCA F. KUANG 'Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance.' NEW YORK TIMES

'Absorbing, atmospheric' Guardian 'A romp of a read, a compelling fix' Scotsman In 1950s Dublin, world-weary pathologist Quirke is reckoning with grief. A woman he loved has died, a man he once admired is dying, and his daughter is still finding it hard to accept him as her father. When an old acquaintance approaches him about his wife's apparent suicide, Quirke recognizes trouble. But, as always, trouble is something he cannot resist. Praise for the Quirke Series: 'A joy to read.' Sunday Times 'Darkly dangerous [with] flinty humour.' Daily Telegraph 'Beguiling characters and evocative settings . . . Impeccable.' The Times

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SNOW 'Banville is one of my favourite writers alive.' REBECCA F. KUANG 'More than a touch of genius.' THE TIMES 'A pleasure to read' IRISH TIMES On the east coast of Ireland, one of the country's most prominent citizens takes his business partner's son out sailing and, while out at sea, shoots himself dead. This strange, enigmatic event captures the attention of pathologist Quirke who begins to investigate. When a second death occurs, one even more shocking than the first, Quirke uncovers dark secrets buried in a rivalry between two entangled families. Praise for the Quirke Series: 'A joy to read.' Sunday Times 'Darkly dangerous [with] flinty humour.' Daily Telegraph 'Beguiling characters and evocative settings . . . Impeccable.' The Times

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SNOW 'Banville is one of my favourite writers alive.' REBECCA F. KUANG 'More than a touch of genius.' THE TIMES William 'Big Bill' Mulholland is head of one of New York's wealthiest dynasties. When Mulholland gets wind of a hostile biography planned, he commissions his journalist son-in-law John Glass to pen the official line. To help with the job, Glass hires a beady-eyed researcher - 'the lemur'. But the next day, the Lemur is found dead, shot through the eye with a Beretta. What is the secret he knew, had he told anyone else, and why are the police suddenly asking Glass a lot of questions?