John Banville

A NovelIn 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...

One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Miltons Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable narrator of John Banvilles 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, he is also an escapee from its conflagrations, 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 and invention? That is the question that fuels this...

On a languid midsummers day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician, is dying. His family gathers at his bedside: his son, young Adam, struggling to maintain his marriage to a radiantly beautiful actress; his nineteen-year-old daughter, Petra, filled with voices and visions as she waits for the inevitable; their...

StoriesA collection of short stories from the early years of Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville's career, Long Lankin explores the passionate emotionsfear, jealousy, desirethat 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...

Portraits of a CityPrague 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,...