John Banville

Investigating the murder of a County Wexford priest in 1957, Detective Inspector St. John Strafford navigates harsh winter weather and the community's culture of silence to expose an aristocratic family's dangerous secrets.

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;...

An actor in the twilight of his career reflects on a poignant first love affair at the age of fifteen with his best friend's mother and inexplicably lands a role opposite a famous but fragile actress who helps him come to an astonishing realization.

"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar--a dazzling new novel that extends the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, into unexpected (and completely stand-alone) territory. Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naive girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a...

On a languid midsummer's day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician lies dying. Gathered around him are his family: Adam, his son; Adam's wife; Petra, his daughter; his wife Ursula, stepmother to his children; and his daughter's young man. But the Godley family is not alone in their vigil. Around them hovers a family of mischievious immortals who begin to stir up trouble to sometimes wildly unintended effect.

"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...

"From one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern European experience, a panoramic view of a city that has seduced and bewitched visitors for centuries. Prague 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,...

A classic novel of family, isolation and a blighted Ireland from the award—winning author of “The Sea” depicts the end of innocence for a boy and his country. Once the big house on an Irish estate, Birchwood has turned into a dilapidated family manor filled with memories and despair. One disaster succeeds another, until young Gabriel Godkin runs away to join a traveling circus and look for his long-lost twin sister. Soon he discovers that famine...

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.

Booker Prize winner and "Irish master" (New Yorker) John Banville's most ambitious crime novel yet brings two detectives together to solve a globe-spanning mystery In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found dead in her car. Renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI St. John Strafford begin to investigate the death as a murder, but it's the victim's older sister Molly, an established journalist, who discovers a lead that could...