John Banville
Author
Language
English
Description
"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...
2) Snow
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
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. --
3) The sea
Author
Language
English
Description
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife.
In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his...
In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
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 crack open the case. One of Rosa's friends, it turns out, is from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after World War...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
"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." --
8) Shroud
Author
Language
English
Description
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a splendidly moving, "hypnotic" exploration (The New York Times) of identity, duplicity, and desire, starring a very old, recently widowed man with secrets and the mysterious young woman destined to either destroy or save him.
One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton’s Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable...
One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton’s Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"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...
11) Long Lankin
Author
Pub. Date
2013.
Language
English
Formats
Description
An early short story collection by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea explores the depths of family dysfunction, insanity and death and includes the stories of a couple being torn apart by wealth and an elderly man's descent into nature and madness.
12) The blue guitar
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
"As he pushes fifty, painter and petty thief Oliver Otway Orme reflects on his life, trying to uncover the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have, excavating memories of family, of places he has called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him"--
Author
Series
Publisher
Macmillan Audio
Pub. Date
2014
Language
English
Description
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe returns in The Black-Eyed Blonde—also published as Marlowe as by John Banville—the basis for the major motion picture starring Liam Neeson as the iconic detective.
"Somewhere Raymond Chandler is smiling . . . I loved this book. It was like having an old friend, one you assumed was dead, walk into the room."
—Stephen King
"It was one of those summer
14) The infinities
Author
Pub. Date
2010.
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
“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...
15) The untouchable
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
1997.
Language
English
Description
The story of British Cold War spies told in the form of a memoir by Sir Victor Maskell, a respected art historian unmasked as an agent of the Soviet Union. He describes who they were and why they did it--why he did it--tracing their evolution from the original 1930s Cambridge university graduates to the present. By the author of Athena.
Author
Series
Publisher
Norton
Pub. Date
[1976]
Language
English
Description
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a novel set in sixteenth-century Europe about an obscure cleric who is preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe—while being haunted by his malevolent brother and threatened by the conspiracies raging around him and his ideas.
Sixteenth-century Europe is teeming with change and controversy: wars are being waged by princes and bishops...
Sixteenth-century Europe is teeming with change and controversy: wars are being waged by princes and bishops...
17) Birchwood
Author
Publisher
Norton
Pub. Date
[1973]
Language
English
Description
"A novel that centres 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...
18) Kepler, a novel
Author
Series
Publisher
D.R. Godine
Pub. Date
1983.
Language
English
Description
The award—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...
20) Athena
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
1995.
Language
English
Description
An art expert is hired by Irish gangsters to authenticate some 17th Century Dutch paintings. The job leads to an affair with a gangster's moll, a sado-masochistic liaison which mirrors the subject matter of the paintings. A tale of a twin obsession, art and woman.